Paper 2026/1925

Reproducible Design-Space Study of Lightweight Lattice-Based Authentication and Signatures for Blockchain Transactions

Abstract

Quantum computers threaten the classical public-key primitives (RSA, ECDSA) used by most blockchains today; NIST has therefore standardized lattice-based signatures (ML-DSA, FIPS 204; and FN-DSA, a FALCON-based scheme being finalized as FIPS 206) and mandated a transition of the underlying cryptosystems. This report describes a reproducible, teaching-level study of the design space of lightweight lattice-based authentication and signatures for blockchain-style transactions. We study two constructions: (i) Track A, a symmetric LWE authentication tag whose matrix is derived per transaction from SHA-256 ("one transaction, one matrix"), and (ii) Track B, a ringless public-key lattice signature in the Lyubashevsky Fiat-Shamir-with-Aborts style. Our contribution is methodological rather than a claim of a new provably secure scheme: we (a) propose a parameter instantiation workflow that combines a root-Hermite/core-SVP estimator with scaled-down LLL embedding attacks and validate the two layers against each other; (b) study a message-derived matrix variant that removes the need to transmit a matrix seed; and (c) release an open, fully reproducible benchmark (E1-E4) that follows recent methodological critiques of ML-DSA evaluation by reporting full latency distributions and rejection-sampling worst cases instead of means only. All code, data, seeds, and figures are public. We do not claim formal security proofs; formal analysis and module/ring-structured instantiations are left to future work.