LaSDVS : A Post-Quantum Secure Compact Strong-Designated Verifier Signature

Abstract: Digital signatures are fundamental cryptographic primitives that ensure the authenticity and integrity of digital communication. However, in scenarios involving sensitive interactions -- such as e-voting or e-cash -- there is a growing need for more controlled signing mechanisms. Strong-Designated Verifier Signature (SDVS) offers such control by allowing the signer to specify and restrict the verifier of a signature. The existing state-of-the-art SDVS are mostly based on number-theoretic hardness assumptions. Thus, they are not secure against quantum attacks. Moreover, Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC)-based SDVS are inefficient and have large key and signature sizes. In this work, we address these challenges and propose an efficient post-quantum SDVS (namely, LaSDVS) based on ideal lattices under the hardness assumptions of the Ring-SIS and Ring-LWE problems. LaSDVS achieves advanced security properties including strong unforgeability under chosen-message attacks, non-transferability, non-delegatability, and signer anonymity. By employing the algebraic structure of rings and the gadget trapdoor mechanism of Micciancio et al., we design LaSDVS to minimize computational overhead and significantly reduce key and signature sizes. Notably, our scheme achieves a compact signature size of $\mathcal{O}(n\log q)$, compared to $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ size, where $n$ is the security parameter, in the existing state-of-the-art PQC designs. To the best of our knowledge, LaSDVS offers the \textit{smallest private key and signature size} among the existing PQC-based SDVS schemes.