A Novel Cryptoprocessor Architecture for Chained Merkle Signature Scheme

One-time signature schemes rely on hash functions and are, therefore, assumed to be resistant to attacks by quantum computers. These approaches inherently raise a key management problem, as the key pair can be used only for one message. That means, for one-time signature schemes to work, the sender must deliver the veri�cation key together with the message and the signature. Upon reception, the receiver has to verify the authenticity of the veri�cation key before verifying the signature itself. Hash-tree based solutions tackle this problem by basing the authenticity of a large number of veri�cation keys on the authenticity of a root key. This approach, however, causes computation, communication, and storage overhead. Due to hardware acceleration, this paper proposes, for the �rst time, a processor architecture which boosts the performance of a one-time signature scheme without degrading memory usage and communication properties..