International Association
for Cryptologic Research

A signature scheme based on multivariate quadratic equations, Rainbow, was selected as one of digital signature finalists for NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Round 3. In this paper, we provide efficient implementations of Rainbow and UOV using the AVX2 instruction set. These efficient implementations include several optimizations for signing to accelerate solving linear systems and the Vinegar value substitution. We propose a new block matrix inversion (BMI) method using the Lower-Diagonal-Upper decomposition of blocks matrices based on the Schur complement that accelerates solving linear systems. Compared to UOV implemented with Gaussian elimination, our implementations with the BMI result in speedups of 12.36%, 24.3%, and 34% for signing at security categories I, III, and V, respectively. Compared to Rainbow implemented with Gaussian elimination, our implementations with the BMI result in speedups of 16.13% and 20.73% at the security categories III and V, respectively. We show that precomputation for the Vinegar value substitution and solving linear systems dramatically improve their signing. UOV with precomputation is 16.9 times, 35.5 times, and 62.8 times faster than UOV without precomputation at the three security categories, respectively. Rainbow with precomputation is 2.1 times, 2.2 times, and 2.8 times faster than Rainbow without precomputation at the three security categories, respectively. We then investigate resilience against leakage or reuse of the precomputed values in UOV and Rainbow to use the precomputation securely: leakage or reuse of the precomputed values leads to their full secret key recoveries in polynomial-time.

In this paper, we investigate the security of Rainbow and Unbalanced Oil-and-Vinegar (UOV) signature schemes based on multivariate quadratic equations, which is one of the most promising alternatives for post-quantum signature schemes, against side-channel attacks. We describe correlation power analysis (CPA) on the schemes that yield full secret key recoveries. First, we identify a secret leakage of secret affine maps S and T during matrix-vector products in signing when Rainbow is implemented with equivalent keys rather than random affine maps for optimal implementations. In this case, the simple structure of the equivalent keys leads to the retrieval of the entire secret affine map T. Next, we extend the full secret key recovery to the general case using random affine maps via a hybrid attack: after recovering S by performing CPA, we recover T by mounting algebraic key recovery attacks. We demonstrate how this leakage on Rainbow can be practically exploited on an 8-bit AVR microcontroller using CPA. Consequently, our CPA can be applied to Rainbow-like multi-layered schemes regardless of the use of the simple-structured equivalent keys and UOV-like single layer schemes with the implementations using the equivalent keys of the simple structure. This is the first result on the security of multivariate quadratic equations-based signature schemes using only CPA. Our result can be applied to Rainbow-like multi-layered schemes and UOV-like single layer schemes submitted to NIST for Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization.