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CMSS – An Improved Merkle Signature Scheme

2006; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/11941378_25

1611-3349

Johannes Buchmann, Luis Carlos Coronado García, Erik Dahmen, Martin Döring, Elena Klintsevich,

Cryptography and Residue Arithmetic

The Merkle signature scheme (MSS) is an interesting alternative for well established signature schemes such as RSA, DSA, and ECDSA. The security of MSS only relies on the existence of cryptographically secure hash functions. MSS has a good chance of being quantum computer resistant. In this paper, we propose CMSS, a variant of MSS, with reduced private key size, key pair generation time, and signature generation time. We demonstrate that CMSS is competitive in practice by presenting a highly efficient implementation within the Java Cryptographic Service Provider FlexiProvider. We present extensive experimental results and show that our implementation can for example be used to sign messages in Microsoft Outlook.