Paper 2025/1906

A Simple and Efficient One-Shot Signature Scheme

Vinod Vaikuntanathan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abstract

One-shot signatures (OSS) are a powerful and uniquely quantum cryptographic primitive which allows anyone, given common reference string, to come up with a public verification key $\mathsf{pk}$ and a secret signing state $\ket{\mathsf{sk}}$. With the secret signing state, one can produce the signature of any one message, but no more. In a recent breakthrough work, Shmueli and Zhandry (CRYPTO 2025) constructed one-shot signatures, either unconditionally in a classical oracle model or assuming post-quantum indistinguishability obfuscation and the hardness of Learning with Errors (LWE) in the plain model. In this work, we address the inefficiency of the Shmueli-Zhandry construction which signs messages bit-by-bit, resulting in signing keys of $\Theta(\lambda^4)$ qubits and signatures of size $\Theta(\lambda^3)$ bits for polynomially long messages, where $\lambda$ is the security parameter. We construct a new, simple, direct, and efficient one-shot signature scheme which can sign messages of any polynomial length using signing keys of $\Theta(\lambda^2)$ qubits and signatures of size $\Theta(\lambda^2)$ bits. We achieve corresponding savings in runtimes, in both the oracle model and the plain model. In addition, unlike the Shmueli-Zhandry construction, our scheme achieves perfect correctness. Our scheme also achieves strong signature incompressibility, which implies a public-key quantum fire scheme with perfect correctness among other applications, correcting an error in a recent work of Çakan, Goyal and Shmueli (QCrypt 2025) and recovering their applications.

Note: This work is subsumed by [HSVZ26] (https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1210).

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/1906,
      author = {Andrew Huang and Vinod Vaikuntanathan},
      title = {A Simple and Efficient One-Shot Signature Scheme},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/1906},
      year = {2025},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1906}
}