A performance boost for hash-based signatures

Digital signatures have become a key component of many embedded system solutions and are facing strong security and efficiency requirements. In this work, algorithmic improvements for the authentication path computation decrease the average signature computation time by close to 50% when compared to state-of-the-art algorithms. The proposed scheme is implemented on an Intel Core i7 CPU and an AVR ATxmega microcontroller with optimized versions for the respective target platform. The theoretical algorithmic improvements are verified and cryptographic hardware accelerators are used to achieve competitive performance.