Paper 2026/453

A Quantum-Safe Private Group System for Signal from Key Re-Randomizable Signatures

Sebastian Faller, IBM Research - Zurich, ETH Zurich

Felix Günther, IBM Research - Zurich

Julia Hesse, IBM Research - Zurich

Vadim Lyubashevsky, IBM Research - Zurich

Rolfe Schmidt, Signal Messenger

Abstract

Instant messaging services are an integral part of today's communication and their privacy has wide societal implications. Major messengers deploy end-to-end encryption, hiding message contents from the service provider. Group messaging, however, creates the challenge of also keeping the group membership list private. The Signal messenger currently implements private group management using techniques inspired by Chase, Perrin, and Zaverucha (CCS 2020). Transitioning this system to quantum-safe turns out to be challenging: While one-to-one messaging can often adopt the newly standardized KEMs and signatures in a relatively direct way, private group management is more complex. Signal's existing design heavily relies on the discrete-log structure to combine anonymous credentials, verifiable encryption, and oblivious PRFs for privacy and functionality. Quantum-safe versions of these components unfortunately are typically far less efficient, requiring heavy zero-knowledge proofs and large communication per group operation. As a result, simply ``swapping in'' quantum-safe primitives is unlikely to yield an optimal protocol. This paper reconsiders the design of the entire group system from the ground-up. Our result is a scheme that possesses the same strong privacy guarantees, but it is built in a more modular way using simpler underlying cryptographic building blocks that permit a more efficient quantum-safe instantiation. The modularity of our protocol further allows for gradual migration to quantum-safe: we can immediately transition components vulnerable to harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks (such as classical public-key encryption, computationally hiding commitments, etc.) while deferring the transition of other building blocks, such as authentication. We prove our design secure in an extended security model that more comprehensively captures the rich feature set of Signal's group messaging system. In our experimental evaluation, the core operations of our new design turn out to be even more efficient than those of Signal's current deployment.

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/453,
      author = {Graeme Connell and Sebastian Faller and Felix Günther and Julia Hesse and Vadim Lyubashevsky and Rolfe Schmidt},
      title = {A Quantum-Safe Private Group System for Signal from Key Re-Randomizable Signatures},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/453},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/453}
}