Applying the Fiat-Shamir transform on identification schemes is one of the main ways of constructing signature schemes. While the classical security of this transformation is well understood, it is only very recently that generic results for the quantum case have been proposed [DFMS19,LZ19]. These results are asymptotic and therefore can't be used to derive the concrete security of these signature schemes without a significant loss in parameters. In this paper, we show that if we start from a commit-and-open identification scheme, where the prover first commits to several strings and then as a second message opens a subset of them depending on the verifier's message, then there is a tight quantum reduction for the the Fiat-Shamir transform to special soundness notions. Our work applies to most 3 round schemes of this form and can be used immediately to derive quantum concrete security of signature schemes. We apply our techniques to several identification schemes that lead to signature schemes such as Stern's identification scheme based on coding problems, the [KTX08] identification scheme based on lattice problems, the [SSH11] identification schemes based on multivariate problems, closely related to the NIST candidate MQDSS, and the PICNIC scheme based on multiparty computing problems, which is also a NIST candidate.
Applying the Fiat-Shamir transform on identification schemes is one of the main ways of constructing signature schemes. While the classical security of this transformation is well understood, it is only very recently that generic results for the quantum case have been proposed [DFMS19,LZ19]. These results are asymptotic and therefore can't be used to derive the concrete security of these signature schemes without a significant loss in parameters. In this paper, we show that if we start from a commit-and-open identification scheme, where the prover first commits to several strings and then as a second message opens a subset of them depending on the verifier's message, then there is a tight quantum reduction for the the Fiat-Shamir transform to special soundness notions. Our work applies to most 3 round schemes of this form and can be used immediately to derive quantum concrete security of signature schemes. We apply our techniques to several identification schemes that lead to signature schemes such as Stern's identification scheme based on coding problems, the [KTX08] identification scheme based on lattice problems, the [SSH11] identification schemes based on multivariate problems, closely related to the NIST candidate MQDSS, and the PICNIC scheme based on multiparty computing problems, which is also a NIST candidate.
The Fiat-Shamir transformation is a famous technique to turn identification schemes into signature schemes. The derived scheme is provably secure in the random-oracle model against classical adversaries. Still, the technique has also been suggested to be used in connection with quantum-immune identification schemes, in order to get quantum-immune signature schemes. However, a recent paper by Boneh et al. (Asiacrypt 2011) has raised the issue that results in the random-oracle model may not be immediately applicable to quantum adversaries, because such adversaries should be allowed to query the random oracle in superposition. It has been unclear if the Fiat-Shamir technique is still secure in this quantum oracle model (QROM). Here, we discuss that giving proofs for the Fiat-Shamir transformation in the QROM is presumably hard. We show that there cannot be black-box extractors, as long as the underlying quantum-immune identification scheme is secure against active adversaries and the first message of the prover is independent of its witness. Most schemes are of this type. We then discuss that for some schemes one may be able to resurrect the Fiat-Shamir result in the QROM by modifying the underlying protocol first. We discuss in particular a version of the Lyubashevsky scheme which is provably secure in the QROM.
It is obviously necessary that the security of post-quantum cryptographic schemes is based on computational problems that are hard to solve even with a quantum computer (unlike, e.g., factoring). Examples of such computational problems appear in the theory of lattices or in coding theory. However, this is not sufficient: also the security proof, which comes in the form of an algorithmic reduction that turns any hypothetical attacker into an algorithm that solves the considered hard computational problem, needs to be valid when considering quantum computing as the model of computation. In this work, we provide an overview of the hurdles one typically encounters when proving the security of post-quantum cryptographic schemes, and we elaborate on some of the mathematical techniques that have been developed in order to overcome these hurdles (to some extent). We also analyze the caveat that even when a security proof can be established (by reducing the security to a quantum-hard computational problem), the reduction often suffers from a larger reduction loss, compared to when proving classical security, which negatively affects the concrete security. In the second part of this work, we offer a survey of the respective reduction losses in (1) generic transformations that are often used in the design of cryptographic schemes (like the Fiat-Shamir and Fujisaki-Okamoto transformations), and (2) some concrete cryptographic schemes (with a focus on those standardized by NIST), when considering classical and when considering post-quantum security. Finally, we investigate how these reduction losses translate into bit security, the standard measure of the concrete security of a cryptographic scheme (or of the hardness of an underlying computational problem). A natural question is how the bit security is affected by the different reduction losses we encountered. Surprisingly, we observe that a better or worse reduction (in terms of the reduction loss) is not always reflected as such in the bit security. We explain this phenomenon by the fact that the bit security is oblivious to the actual advantage–time function, and instead considers a worst-case behavior of that function. Thus, by exploiting the actual advantage–time function there is potential to get more accurate (i.e., less conservative) estimates for the concrete security.
Digital signatures based on the compact knapsack problem are attractive post-quantum candidates: they rely solely on integer arithmetic, require no algebraic ring structure, and rest on a hardness assumption distinct from the Module-LWE/Module-SIS problems that underlie the recently standardized ML-DSA (FIPS 204). The three-move identification scheme of Rizos and Draziotis (2023) and its Fiat–Shamir signature establish completeness, special soundness, special honest-verifier zero-knowledge, and EUF-CMA security in the random-oracle model. Its concrete parameters, however, were selected by hand, yielding a comparatively large signature (≈ 31.9 KB); the authors explicitly leave smarter parameter selection as future work. We close this gap. First, we provide an independent, fully reproducible re-implementation of the scheme's lattice attacks (the closest-vector and divide-and-conquer attacks) and of its signature-size accounting, validated against the original tables; our re-implementation reproduces the published success rates to within experimental noise. Second, we cast parameter selection as a constrained optimization problem and design an adaptive bit-allocation optimizer that minimizes signature size subject to soundness, completeness, commitment-unpredictability, key-entropy, and an empirical lattice-attack hardness gate. The optimizer exposes two honest sources of slack in the base parameters—an over-provisioned nonce space and an under-tightened secret space. The resulting configuration S = S1/4,1/3, S′ = S′1/8,1/8 shrinks the signature by 19.6% (to 25.6 KB) at identical security: equal soundness (2⁻⁸⁰), equal commitment-unpredictability (2⁻²⁴), equal completeness error (2.15 × 10⁻⁶), empirically equal closest-vector-attack hardness (50.0%), and equal-or-better divide-and-conquer hardness. All code, seeds, and numerical results are released for reproducibility.
In this paper, we present a new TRSS (threshold ring signature scheme) which depends on the worst-case hardness of a lattice problem. We apply Fiat-Shamir transform to a lattice-based identification scheme to obtain the proposed scheme. The hardness of the identification scheme which is the hybrid combination of two different designs is based on inhomogeneous short integer solution (ISIS) problem. We give security proof for the proposed TRSS. Comparing the proposed TRSS and the others which are quantum secure, the size of key pairs and the length of the signature are nearly same. Therefore, the proposed scheme is an alternative to the threshold ring signature schemes in post-quantum area.
An important open question in quantum cryptography is the construction of publicly-verifiable NIZKs for QMA. Classically, one can construct NIZKs for NP in the random oracle model (and sometimes in the standard model) by compiling an honest-verifier ZK (HVZK) Σ-protocol for NP using the Fiat-Shamir transformation. Broadbent and Grilo introduced a quantum analog of a Σ-protocol (which they call a Ξ-protocol) in which the prover's first message is quantum, and show that HVZK Ξ-protocols exist for QMA. However, it is not clear how to compile such protocols into NIZKs in the (Q)ROM, because the Fiat-Shamir transformation seems to be incompatible with quantum messages. In this work we give formal evidence that this is indeed the case: we show that if generic "Fiat-Shamir-like" compilers for quantum protocols exist in the QROM (with small completeness and soundness error) then QMA = BQP.
The study of digital signatures with tight reductions has attracted considerable attention over the past two decades, as such schemes inherit essentially the same quantitative hardness as the underlying computational problem. In the context of lattice-based cryptography, the GPV approach (Gentry, Peikert, and Vaikuntanathan, STOC ’08) admits a simple tight reduction from the SIS problem, but relies on preimage sampling via trapdoors, which often leads to complex and brittle implementations. By contrast, tight proofs for trapdoor-free constructions, following the Fiat–Shamir paradigm, necessarily rely on decisional assumptions, most notably the decisional LWE assumption. From the perspective of concrete security, however, reliance on a search assumption is preferable, as known search-to-decision reductions for LWE provide only weak quantitative guarantees. \ind This paper presents the first efficient lattice-based signature scheme with a tight reduction to a search assumption (namely, the hardness of the search LWE problem) that does not require any trapdoor in the scheme itself (but merely uses, instead, a trapdoor in the proof). Our construction follows the Fiat-Shamir paradigm and can be viewed as a lattice analogue of Chevallier–Mames signatures (CRYPTO ’05). Establishing security in the lattice setting, however, requires overcoming significant technical obstacles: in particular, our proof develops several new techniques to cope with the inherently weak soundness guarantees of lattice-based interactive proofs.