lms-go

README

Leighton-Micali Hash-Based Signatures

This repository contains implementations of Leighton-Micali Hash-Based Signatures (RFC 8554).

Security Notice

LMS signatures are stateful: Users must take care to never sign more than one message with the same internal LM-OTS private key. To avoid catastrophe, state must be maintained across multiple invocations of the signing algorithm.

When using our LMS implementations, the internal counter (q) will be incremented before each signature is returned.

If the LMS private key is persisted to storage, you MUST update the persistent storage after each signature is generated and before it is released to the rest of the application. Failure to adhere to this requirement is a security vulnerability in your application.

For a stateless hash-based signature algorithm, see SPHINCS+.

NOTE: this project has not been externally audited, but the entire codebase was internally reviewed by cryptographers at Trail of Bits.

Installation

go get https://github.com/trailofbits/lms-go

Usage

seckey, err := lms.NewPrivateKey(common.LMS_SHA256_M32_H10, common.LMOTS_SHA256_N32_W4)
pubkey, err := seckey.Public()
// The optional nil argument can be a user-chosen RNG
sig, err   := seckey.Sign([]byte("example"), nil)
sig_valid  := pubkey.Verify([]byte("example"), sig)

Key Management

We do not require much from the user in terms of key management. Any internal state changing operation uses a call by pointer to update the internal state. When persisting private keys to long term storage, users must be very careful that the same private key is never read from disk twice. This would create two private keys in the same state and thus when they are both used to sign a message, the LMOTS private keys will have been reused, which is considered not good.

License

This codebase is licensed under the 3-Clause BSD License.

Contribution

If you are interesting in contributing to this codebase, please see CONTRIBUTING.md for more information.