Breaking Rainbow Takes a Weekend on a Laptop

Ward Beullens

Abstract: This work introduces new key recovery attacks against the Rainbow signature scheme, which is one of the three finalist signature schemes still in the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography standardization project. The new attacks outperform previously known attacks for all the parameter sets submitted to NIST and make a key-recovery practical for the SL 1 parameters. Concretely, given a Rainbow public key for the SL 1 parameters of the second-round submission, our attack returns the corresponding secret key after on average 53 hours (one weekend) of computation time on a standard laptop.