Paper 2026/769

High-Order Masking for MQOM v2.1 Signing

Yi-Lin Hung, National Taiwan University
Jiun-Peng Chen, Academia Sinica
Ho-Lin Chen, National Taiwan University
Bo-Yin Yang, Academia Sinica
Abstract

This paper presents the first high-order fully-shared masking construction for MQOM v2.1, a candidate in NIST's additional digital signature standardization process. We provide a baseline high-order masked signing design for MQOM v2.1, prove its security in the standard probing leakage model, and validate the implementation through a comprehensive TVLA campaign. To mitigate the online-time bottleneck in masked signing, we further introduce an optional Rijndael LUT-based acceleration mode that decouples offline precomputation from online signing. Although this accelerated mode incurs higher offline time and memory costs, it can run during idle periods and significantly reduce online signing latency. We implement and benchmark all 36 MQOM v2.1 signing variants over GF(2), GF(16), and GF(256), and report comprehensive performance and leakage-evaluation results for both the baseline and accelerated designs.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
fully-shared maskinghigh-order maskingMQOM v2.1side-channel17 securitysigningTVLA
Contact author(s)
e88888812 @ gmail com
jiunpeng @ ntu edu tw
holinc @ gmail com
byyang @ iis sinica edu tw
History
2026-04-22: approved
2026-04-19: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2026/769
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/769,
      author = {Yi-Lin Hung and Jiun-Peng Chen and Ho-Lin Chen and Bo-Yin Yang},
      title = {High-Order Masking for {MQOM} v2.1 Signing},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/769},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/769}
}
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