Cryptanalysis of a rank-based signature with short public keys

Abstract

Following Schnorr framework for obtaining digital signatures, Song et al. recently proposed a new instantiation of a signature scheme featuring small public keys from coding assumptions in rank metric, which was accepted at PKC’19. Their proposal makes use of rank quasi-cyclic (RQC) codes to reduce the public key size. We show that it is possible to turn a valid, legitimate signature into an efficiently solvable decoding problem, which allows to recover the randomness used for signing and hence the secret key, from a single signature, in about the same amount of time as required for signing.