qDSA: Small and Secure Digital Signatures with Curve-based Diffie--Hellman Key Pairs

TL;DR

qDSA is a compact, secure digital signature scheme optimized for embedded and IoT devices, leveraging Kummer surface arithmetic to achieve high speed, small memory footprint, and compatibility with existing Diffie--Hellman public keys.

Contribution

The paper introduces qDSA, a novel signature scheme that operates on Kummer varieties without full group operations, enabling efficient implementation on constrained devices.

Findings

qDSA outperforms existing signatures in size and speed.

It requires no full group operations or point recovery.

Efficient point compression reduces storage needs.

Abstract

qDSA is a high-speed, high-security signature scheme that facilitates implementations with a very small memory footprint, a crucial requirement for embedded systems and IoT devices, and that uses the same public keys as modern Diffie--Hellman schemes based on Montgomery curves (such as Curve25519) or Kummer surfaces. qDSA resembles an adaptation of EdDSA to the world of Kummer varieties, which are quotients of algebraic groups by $\pm$1. Interestingly, qDSA does not require any full group operations or point recovery: all computations, including signature verification, occur on the quotient where there is no group law. We include details on four implementations of qDSA, using Montgomery and fast Kummer surface arithmetic on the 8-bit AVR ATmega and 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 platforms. We find that qDSA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art signature implementations in terms of stack usage and code size. We also include an efficient compression algorithm for points on fast Kummer surfaces, reducing them to the same size as compressed elliptic curve points for the same security level.