The SPHINCS+ signature framework

Daniel J. Bernstein, Andreas Hülsing, Stefan Kölbl, Ruben Niederhagen, Joost Rijneveld, Peter Schwabe

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

200 Citations (Scopus)
785 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

We introduce SPHINCS+, a stateless hash-based signature framework. SPHINCS+ has significant advantages over the state of the art in terms of speed, signature size, and security, and is among the nine remaining signature schemes in the second round of the NIST PQC standardization project. One of our main contributions in this context is a new few-time signature scheme that we call FORS. Our second main contribution is the introduction of tweakable hash functions and a demonstration how they allow for a unified security analysis of hash-based signature schemes. We give a security reduction for SPHINCS+ using this abstraction and derive secure parameters in accordance with the resulting bound. Finally, we present speed results for our optimized implementation of SPHINCS+ and compare to SPHINCS-256, Gravity-SPHINCS, and Picnic.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCCS 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
Place of PublicationNew York
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc.
Pages2129-2146
Number of pages18
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-4503-6747-9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 6 Nov 2019
Event26th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2019 - London, United Kingdom
Duration: 11 Nov 201915 Nov 2019

Conference

Conference26th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityLondon
Period11/11/1915/11/19

Funding

The authors would like to thank Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Christoph Dobraunig, Maria Eichlseder, Scott Fluhrer, Stefan-Lukas Gazdag, Panos Kampanakis, Tanja Lange, Martin M. Lauridsen, Florian Mendel, and Christian Rechberger, for their support and comments, and the anonymous reviewers of CCS for finding a mistake in an earlier version of this work. This work has been supported by the European Research Council through Starting Grant No. 805031 (EPOQUE), by Cisco under the University Research Program, by the U.S. National Science Foundation under grant 1913167, and by the German Research Foundation under Cluster of Excellence 2092 ?CASA: Cyber Security in the Age of Large-Scale Adversaries?.

Keywords

  • Exact security
  • Hash-based signatures
  • NIST PQC
  • Post-quantum cryptography
  • SPHINCS
  • Stateless
  • Tweakable hash functions

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'The SPHINCS+ signature framework'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this