Announcing two new LMS libraries

The Trail of Bits cryptography team is pleased to announce the open-sourcing of our pure Rust and Go implementations of Leighton-Micali Hash-Based Signatures (LMS), a well-studied NIST-standardized post-quantum digital signature algorithm. If you or your organization are looking to transition to post-quantum support for digital signatures, both of these implementations have been engineered and reviewed by several of our cryptographers, so please give them a try!

For the Rust codebase, we’ve worked with the RustCrypto team to integrate our implementation into the RustCrypto/signatures repository so that it can immediately be used with their ecosystem once the crate is published.

Our Go implementation was funded by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), as part of a larger post-quantum readiness effort within the Sigstore ecosystem. We’d like to thank HPE and Tim Pletcher in particular for supporting and collaborating on this high-impact work!

LMS is a stateful hash-based signature scheme that was standardized in 2019 with RFC 8554 and subsequently adopted into the federal information processing standards in 2020. These algorithms are carefully designed to resist quantum computer attacks, which could threaten conventional algebraic signature schemes like RSA and ECDSA. Unlike other post-quantum signature designs, LMS was standardized before NIST’s large post-quantum cryptography standardization program was completed. LMS has been studied for years and its security bounds are well understood, so it was not surprising that these schemes were selected and standardized in a relatively short time frame (at least compared to the other standards).

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