Ring Signatures for Deniable AKEM: Gandalf's Fellowship

Ring signatures, a cryptographic primitive introduced by Rivest, Shamir and Tauman (ASIACRYPT 2001), offer signer anonymity within dynamically formed user groups. Recent advancements have focused on lattice-based constructions to improve efficiency, particularly for large signing rings. However, current state-of-the-art solutions suffer from significant overhead, especially for smaller rings.

In this work, we present a novel NTRU-based ring signature scheme, Gandalf, tailored towards small rings. Our post-quantum scheme achieves a 50% reduction in signature sizes compared to the linear ring signature scheme Raptor (ACNS 2019). For rings of size two, our signatures are approximately a quarter the size of DualRing (CRYPTO 2021), another linear scheme, and remain more compact for rings up to size seven. Compared to the sublinear scheme Smile (CRYPTO 2021), our signatures are more compact for rings of up to 26. In particular, for rings of size two, our ring signatures are only 1236 bytes.

Additionally, we explore the use of ring signatures to obtain deniability in authenticated key exchange mechanisms (AKEMs), the primitive behind the recent HPKE standard used in MLS and TLS. We take a fine-grained approach at formalising sender deniability within AKEM and seek to define the strongest possible notions. Our contributions extend to a black-box construction of a deniable AKEM from a KEM and a ring signature scheme for rings of size two. Our approach attains the highest level of confidentiality and authenticity, while simultaneously preserving the strongest forms of deniability in two orthogonal settings. Finally, we present parameter sets for our schemes, and show that our deniable AKEM, when instantiated with our ring signature scheme, yields ciphertexts of 2004 bytes.