Paper 2017/518

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

Joost Renes and Benjamin Smith

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 groups by \(\pm1\). Interestingly, it 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 arithmetic on the 8-bit AVR ATmega and 32-bit 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 a compression algorithm for points on fast Kummer surfaces, reducing them to the same size as compressed elliptic curve points for the same security level.