Paper 2023/1135

HaMAYO: A Fault-Tolerant Reconfigurable Hardware Implementation of the MAYO Signature Scheme

Abstract

MAYO is a topical modification of the established multivariate signature scheme UOV. Signer and Verifier locally enlarge the public key map, such that the dimension of the oil space and therefore, the parameter sizes in general, can be reduced. This significantly reduces the public key size while maintaining the appealing properties of UOV, like short signatures and fast verification. Therefore, MAYO is considered as an attractive candidate in the NIST call for additional digital signatures and might be an adequate solution for real-world deployment in resource-constrained devices. When emerging to hardware implementation of multivariate schemes and specifically MAYO, different challenges are faced, namely resource utilization, which scales up with higher parameter sets. To accommodate this, we introduce a configurable hardware implementation designed for integration across various FPGA architectures. Our approach features adaptable configurations aligned with NIST-defined security levels and incorporates resources optimization modules. Our implementation is specifically tested on the Zynq ZedBoard with the Zynq-7020 SoC, with performance evaluations and comparisons made against previous hardware implementations of multivariate schemes. Furthermore, we conducted a security analysis of the MAYO implementation highlighting potential physical attacks and implemented lightweight countermeasures.