International Association
for Cryptologic Research

In this work we apply information theoretically optimal arithmetic coding and a number of novel side-channel blinding countermeasure techniques to create BLZZRD, a practical, compact, and more quantum-resistant variant of the BLISS Ring-LWE Signature Scheme. We show how the hash-based random oracle can be modified to be more secure against quantum preimage attacks while decreasing signature size at any given security level. Most lattice-based cryptographic algorithms require non-uniformly distributed ciphertext, signature, and public/private key data to be stored and transmitted; hence there is a requirement for compression. Arithmetic Coding offers an information theoretically optimal compression for stationary and memoryless sources, such as the discrete Gaussian distributions often used in Lattice-based cryptography. We show that this technique gives better signature sizes than the previously proposed advanced Huffman-based compressors. We further demonstrate that arithmetic decoding from an uniform source to target distribution is also an optimal Gaussian sampling method in the sense that a minimal amount of true random bits is required. Performance of the new Binary Arithmetic Coding (BAC) sampler is comparable to other mainstream samplers. The same code, tables, or circuitry can be utilised for both tasks, eliminating the need for separate sampling and compression components. We also describe a simple blinding technique that can be applied to anti-cyclic polynomial multiplication to mask timing- and power consumption side-channels in ring arithmetic. We further show that Gaussian sampling can also be blinded by a split-and-permute technique while reducing the size of required CDF tables.