International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Post-quantum digital signature schemes have recently received increased attention due to the NIST standardization project for additional signatures. MPC-in-the-Head and VOLE-in-the-Head are general techniques for constructing such signatures from zero-knowledge proof systems. A common theme between the two is an all-but-one vector commitment scheme which internally uses GGM trees. This primitive is responsible for a significant part of the computational time during signing and verification.

A more efficient technique for constructing GGM trees is the half-tree technique, introduced by Guo et al. (Eurocrypt 2023). Our work builds an all-but-one vector commitment scheme from the half-tree technique, and further generalizes it to an all-but-\(\tau\) vector commitment scheme. Crucially, our work avoids the use of the random oracle assumption in an important step, which means our binding proof is non-trivial and instead relies on the random permutation oracle. Since this oracle can be instantiated using fixed-key AES which has hardware support, we achieve faster signing and verification times.

We integrate our vector commitment scheme into FAEST (faest.info), a round one candidate in the NIST standardization process, and demonstrates its performance with a prototype implementation. For \(\lambda = 128\), our experimental results show a nearly \(3.5\)-fold improvement in signing and verification times.