In a ring signature scheme, a user selects an arbitrary ring to be able to sign a message on behalf of the ring without revealing the signer’s identity. Whistle-blowers especially find this useful. To date, various ring signature schemes have been proposed, all considered to be secure as existentially unforgeable with respect to insider corruption; that is, an adversary who chooses ring-message pairs for which he requests signatures, corrupts honest users, and obtains their signing keys can not produce forgeries for new ring-message pairs. Lattice-based ring signature schemes offer lower computational overhead and security from quantum attacks. In this paper, we offer a lattice-based scheme. We begin by showing that the existing ring signature schemes are not sufficiently secure, because existential unforgeability still permits a signer to potentially produce a new signature on previously signed messages. Furthermore, we show that existing ring signature schemes from lattices are not even existentially unforgeable with respect to insider corruption. We then improve previous schemes by applying, for the first time, the concept of strong unforgeability with respect to insider corruption to a ring signature scheme in lattices. This offers more security than any previous ring signature scheme: adversaries cannot produce new signatures for any ring-message pair, including previously signed ring-message pairs.
In a ring signature scheme, a user selects an arbitrary ring to be able to sign a message on behalf of the ring without revealing the signer’s identity. Whistle-blowers especially find this useful. To date, various ring signature schemes have been proposed, all considered to be secure as existentially unforgeable with respect to insider corruption; that is, an adversary who chooses ring-message pairs for which he requests signatures, corrupts honest users, and obtains their signing keys can not produce forgeries for new ring-message pairs. Lattice-based ring signature schemes offer lower computational overhead and security from quantum attacks. In this paper, we offer a lattice-based scheme. We begin by showing that the existing ring signature schemes are not sufficiently secure, because existential unforgeability still permits a signer to potentially produce a new signature on previously signed messages. Furthermore, we show that existing ring signature schemes from lattices are not even existentially unforgeable with respect to insider corruption. We then improve previous schemes by applying, for the first time, the concept of strong unforgeability with respect to insider corruption to a ring signature scheme in lattices. This offers more security than any previous ring signature scheme: adversaries cannot produce new signatures for any ring-message pair, including previously signed ring-message pairs.
Abstract. We propose a variant of the “bonsai tree ” signature scheme, a lattice-based existentially unforgeable signature scheme in the standard model. Our construction offers the same efficiency as the “bonsai tree” scheme but supports the stronger notion of strong unforgeability. Strong unforgeability demands that the adversary is unable to produce a new message-signature pair (m, s), even if he or she is allowed to see a different signature s ′ for m. In particular, we provide the first treeless signature scheme that supports strong unforgeability for the post-quantum era in the standard model. Moreover, we show how to directly implement identity-based, and even hierarchical identity-based, signatures (IBS) in the same strong security model without random oracles. An additional advantage of this direct approach over the usual generic conversion of hierarchical identity-based encryption to IBS is that we can exploit the efficiency of ideal lattices without significantly harming security. We equip all constructions with strong security proofs based on mild worst-case assumptions on lattices and we also propose concrete security parameters.
Ring signatures, a novel cryptographic primitive, were introduced by Rivest, Shamir, and Tauman at ASIACRYPT 2001. It allows a member of a group to sign a message on behalf of an ad-hoc group of users, known as a ring, without revealing its identity. Ring signatures, initially introduced for applications such as whistle-blowing and confidential disclosures, have since gained significant relevance and widespread adoption across various domains, including blockchain technologies, ad-hoc networks, anonymous transactions, location-based services, cloud computing platforms, and outsourced computation. However, traditional ring signatures are vulnerable if the signers’ keys are compromised. To resolve this vulnerability, Liu and Wong introduced the notion of forward-secure ring signatures at IJNS 2008. Forward-security ensures that even if a signer’s secret key is compromised, signatures generated in prior time periods remain secure. It significantly reduces the damage caused by secret key exposure, making it crucial for long-term security in applications such as whistle-blowing or anonymous authentication. However, most existing forward-secure ring signature schemes are based on number-theoretic assumptions, making them vulnerable to quantum adversaries. Yu and Wang proposed a quantum-safe forward-secure ring signature scheme at ICICS 2023, and Yu et al. further extended this work in Computer Networks (2025), retaining the same ring signature scheme with forward security. But the scheme suffers from large signatures that grow linearly with the ring size. In this paper, we propose a lattice-based forward-secure ring signature scheme in the quantum random oracle model ( QROM ) that simultaneously achieves security against quantum adversaries and compact signature size. Notably, the signature size is logarithmic in the number of members in the ring, enabling significantly better scalability compared to prior constructions.
Strongly unforgeable signature schemes provide a more stringent security guarantee than the standard existential unforgeability. It requires that not only forging a signature on a new message is hard, it is infeasible as well to produce a new signature on a message for which the adversary has seen valid signatures before. Strongly unforgeable signatures are useful both in practice and as a building block in many cryptographic constructions. This work investigates a generic transformation that compiles any existential-unforgeable scheme into a strongly unforgeable one, which was proposed by Teranishi et al. and was proven in the classical random-oracle model. Our main contribution is showing that the transformation also works against quantum adversaries in the quantum random-oracle model. We develop proof techniques such as adaptively programming a quantum random-oracle in a new setting, which could be of independent interest. Applying the transformation to an existential-unforgeable signature scheme due to Cash et al., which can be shown to be quantum-secure assuming certain lattice problems are hard for quantum computers, we get an efficient quantum-secure strongly unforgeable signature scheme in the quantum random-oracle model.
Among post-quantum alternatives, latticebased cryptography is the most promising one, due to its simple operations, reduction from aver-age-case to worstcase hardness, and supporting of rich functionalities. Ring signature enables a user to sign anonymously on behalf of an adaptively chosen group, and has multiple applications in anonymous e-voting, anonymous authentication, whistle blowing etc. However, most lattice-based ring signature schemes were constructed in the random oracle model from lattice basis delegation and they suffer large verification key sizes as a common disadvantage. This work proposes an efficient ring signature scheme from lattice basis delegation without random oracle based on the extended split-SIS problem, whose security is approximately as hard as the worst-case SIVP problem. Our scheme is proved to be anonymous and existentially unforgeable under latticebased assumptions. Finally, the verification key size is significantly reduced to a small constant, instead of increasing linearly with the number of ring members.
We propose a short signature scheme under the ring-SIS assumption in the standard model. Specifically, by revisiting an existing construction [Ducas and Micciancio, CRYPTO 2014], we demonstrate lattice-based signatures with improved reduction loss. As far as we know, there are no ways to use multiple tags in the signature simulation of security proof in the lattice tag-based signatures. We address the tag-collision possibility in the lattice setting, which improves reduction loss. Our scheme generates tags from messages by constructing a scheme under a mild security condition that is existentially unforgeable against random message attack with auxiliary information. Thus our scheme can reduce the signature size since it does not need to send tags with the signatures. Our scheme has short signature sizes of O(1) and achieves tighter reduction loss than that of Ducas et al.'s scheme. Our proposed scheme has two variants. Our scheme with one property has tighter reduction and the same verification key size of O(log n) as that of Ducas et al.'s scheme, where n is the security parameter. Our scheme with the other property achieves much tighter reduction loss of O(Q/n) and verification key size of O(n), where Q is the number of signing queries.
Ring signature enables the members to sign anonymously without a manager, it has many online applications, such as e-voting, e-money, whistle blowing etc. As a promising post-quantum candidate, lattice-based cryptography attracts much attention recently. Several efficient lattice-based ring signatures have been naturally constructed from lattice basis delegation, but all of them have large verification key sizes. Our observation finds that a new concept called the split- small integer solution(SIS) problem introduced by Nguyen et al. at PKC’15 is excellent in reducing the public key sizes of lattice-based ring signature schemes from basis delegation. In this research, we first define an extended concept called the extended split-SIS problem, and then prove that the hardness of the extended problem is as hard as the approximating shortest independent vectors problem(SIVP) problem within certain polynomial factor. Moreover, we present an improved ring signature and prove that it is anonymous and unforgeable against the insider corruption. Finally, we give two other improved existing ring signature schemes from lattices. In the end, we show the comparison with the original scheme in terms of the verification key sizes. Our research data illustrate that the public key sizes of the proposed schemes are reduced significantly.