Hash-Based Signatures in Rust

This repository contains a prototypical Rust implementation of (synchronized) signatures based on tweakable hash functions and incomparable encodings. The code has not been audited and is not meant to be used in production. It is a playground to explore and benchmark these signatures.

Tests

Run the tests with

cargo test

By default, this will exclude some of the tests. In particular, correctness tests for real instantiations take quite long and are excluded. If you want to run all tests, you can use

cargo test --release --features slow-tests

Removing the --release is also an option but tests will take even longer.

Benchmarks

Benchmarks are provided using criterion. They take a while, as key generation is expensive, and as a large number of schemes are benchmarked. Run them with

cargo bench

The schemes that are benchmarked are hardcoded instantiations of the generic framework, which are defined in hashsig::signature::generalized_xmss. The parameters of these instantiations have been chosen carefully with the aim to achieve a desired security level. By default, key generation is not benchmarked. There are two options to benchmark it:

1. add the option --features with-gen-benches-sha or --features with-gen-benches-poseidon to cargo bench. Note that this will make benchmarks very slow, as key generation will be repeated within the benchmarks. Especially for Poseidon, this is not recommended.
2. use code similar to the one provided in src/bin/main.rs and run it with cargo run --release.

If criterion only generates json files, one way to extract all means for all benchmarks easily (without re-running criterion) is to run

python3 benchmark-mean.py target

Confidence intervals can also be shown via

python3 benchmark-mean.py target --intervals

License

Apache Version 2.0.