Paper 2026/1775

A Note on the Security Proof of SQIsign

Maher Mamah, University of Waterloo
David Jao, University of Waterloo
Abstract

Aardal et al. (CRYPTO 2025) provided the first complete security proof of SQIsign; however, their reduction incurs a square-root loss in the prime characteristic due to the application of a loose bound on the min-entropy. For instance, at NIST security level I, an adversary making $2^{64}$ signing queries renders the security proof vacuous. In this note, we show that the min-entropy of SQIsign is optimal, namely $\mathcal{O}(1/p)$. Although this improvement does not yield full $\lambda$-bit security, we show that it preserves two-thirds of the expected bit-security. We show that this artifact comes from an information-theoretic loss in the zero-knowledge simulation of SQIsign, suggesting a new proof technique is needed to achieve full $\lambda$-bit security at the current parameters.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Public-key cryptography
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
Isogeny-based cryptographySQIsignSecurity proof
Contact author(s)
mmamah @ uwaterloo ca
djao @ uwaterloo ca
History
2026-08-24: approved
2026-08-22: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2026/1775
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/1775,
      author = {Maher Mamah and David Jao},
      title = {A Note on the Security Proof of {SQIsign}},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/1775},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1775}
}
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