Hash-based signatures for the internet of things

While numerous digital signature schemes exist in the literature, most real-world system rely on RSA-based signature schemes or on the digital signature algorithm (DSA), including its elliptic curve cryptography variant ECDSA. In this position paper we review a family of alternative signature schemes, based on hash functions, and we make the case for their application in Internet of Things (IoT) settings. Hash-based signatures provide postquantum security, and only make minimal security assumptions, in general requiring only a secure cryptographic hash function. This makes them extremely flexible, as they can be implemented on top of any hash function that satisfies basic security properties. Hash-based signatures also feature numerous parameters defining aspects such as signing speed and key size, that enable trade-offs in constrained environments. Simplicity of implementation and customization make hash based signatures an attractive candidate for the IoT ecosystem, which is composed of a number of diverse, constrained devices

Is Java Card ready for hash-based signatures?

The current Java Card platform does not seem to allow for fast implementations of hash-based signature schemes. While the underlying implementation of the cryptographic primitives provided by the API can be fast, thanks to implementations in native code or in hardware, the cumulative overhead of the many separate API calls results in prohibitive performance for many common applications. In this work, we present an implementation of XMSS$^{MT}$ on the current Java Card platform, and make suggestions how to improve this platform in future versions

Expansion of neopterin and beta2-microglobulin in cerebrospinal fluid reaches maximum levels early and late in the course of human immunodeficiency virus infection

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Classical Proofs for the Quantum Collapsing Property of Classical Hash Functions

Hash functions are of fundamental importance in theoretical and in practical cryptography, and with the threat of quantum computers possibly emerging in the future, it is an urgent objective to understand the security of hash functions in the light of potential future quantum attacks. To this end, we reconsider the collapsing property of hash functions, as introduced by Unruh, which replaces the notion of collision resistance when considering quantum attacks. Our contribution is a formalism and a framework that offers significantly simpler proofs for the collapsing property of hash functions. With our framework, we can prove the collapsing property for hash domain extension constructions entirely by means of decomposing the iteration function into suitable elementary composition operations. In particular, given our framework, one can argue purely classically about the quantum-security of hash functions; this is in contrast to previous proofs which are in terms of sophisticated quantum-information-theoretic and quantum-algorithmic reasoning

Hash-based Signatures Revisited: A Dynamic FORS with Adaptive Chosen Message Security

FORS is the underlying hash-based few-time signing scheme in SPHINCS+, one of the nine signature schemes which advanced to round 2 of the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography standardization competition. In this paper, we analyze the security of FORS with respect to adaptive chosen message attacks. We show that in such a setting, the security of FORS decreases significantly with each signed message when compared to its security against non-adaptive chosen message attacks. We propose a chaining mechanism that with slightly more computation, dynamically binds the Obtain Random Subset (ORS) generation with signing, hence, eliminating the offline advantage of adaptive chosen message adversaries. We apply our chaining mechanism to FORS and present DFORS whose security against adaptive chosen message attacks is equal to the non-adaptive security of FORS. In a nutshell, using SPHINCS+-128s parameters, FORS provides 75-bit security and DFORS achieves 150-bit security with respect to adaptive chosen message attacks after signing one message. We note that our analysis does not affect the claimed security of SPHINCS+. Nevertheless, this work provides a better understanding of FORS and other HORS variants and furnishes a solution if new adaptive cryptanalytic techniques on SPHINCS+ emerge

Grafting Trees: a Fault Attack against the SPHINCS framework

Because they require no assumption besides the preimage or collision resistance of hash functions, hash-based signatures are a unique and very attractive class of post-quantum primitives. Among them, the schemes of the SPHINCS family are arguably the most practical stateless schemes, and can be implemented on embedded devices such as FPGAs or smart cards. This naturally raises the question of their resistance to implementation attacks. In this paper, we propose the first fault attack against the framework underlying SPHINCS, Gravity-SPHINCS and SPHINCS+. Our attack allows to forge any message signature at the cost of a single faulted message. Furthermore, the fault model is very reasonable and the faulted signatures remain valid, which renders our attack both stealthy and practical. As the attack involves a non-negligible computational cost, we propose a fine-grained trade-off allowing to lower this cost by slightly increasing the number of faulted messages. Our attack is generic in the sense that it does not depend on the underlying hash function(s) used

LMS vs XMSS: Comparison of Stateful Hash-Based Signature Schemes on ARM Cortex-M4

Stateful hash-based signature schemes are among the most efficient approaches for post-quantum signature schemes. Although not suitable for general use, they may be suitable for some use cases on constrained devices. LMS and XMSS are hash-based signature schemes that are conjectured to be quantum secure. In this work, we compared multiple instantiations of both schemes on an ARM Cortex-M4. More precisely, we compared performance, stack consumption, and other figures for key generation, signing and verifying. To achieve this, we evaluated LMS and XMSS using optimised implementations of SHA-256, SHAKE256, Gimli-Hash, and different variants of Keccak. Furthermore, we present slightly optimised implementations of XMSS achieving speedups of up to 3.11x for key generation, 3.11x for signing, and 4.32x for verifying

Managing Individual Workplace Grievances and Disciplinary Procedures

This paper examines ways of effectively managing individual workplace grievances and disciplinary procedures. There are three principle areas that will be the focus of this page: • dealing with conflict between co-workers; • managing workplace complaints and investigation procedures; and • implementing appropriate disciplinary procedures. These issues on the whole tend to be aired in the course of unfair dismissal proceedings, when the substantive and procedural fairness of a dismissal is considered. However, good HR practices should ensure that the issues are well managed from the outset through established procedures, long before the issue of unfair dismissal arises

A Blockchain-Assisted Hash-Based Signature Scheme

We present a server-supported, hash-based digital signature scheme. To achieve greater efficiency than current state of the art, we relax the security model somewhat. We postulate a set of design requirements, discuss some approaches and their practicality, and finally reach a forward-secure scheme with only modest trust assumptions, achieved by employing the concepts of authenticated data structures and blockchains. The concepts of blockchain authenticated data structures and the presented blockchain design could have independent value and are worth further research