Fast Implementation of Rainbow Signatures via Efficient Arithmetic over a Finite Field

An efficient hardware implementation of Rainbow signature scheme is presented in this paper. It introduces an effective way to accelerate the generation of multivariate signatures by using optimized arithmetics including multiplication, multiplicative inverse and Gaussian elimination over finite fields. Not only the speed but also the area are considered in the design. 27 parallel multipliers are adopted and the design has been fully implemented on a low-cost Field Programmable Gate Array. Compared with other public key implementations, the proposed implementation with 15490 gate equivalents and 2570 clock cycles has better performance. The cycle-area product of this implementation shows that it is suitable for fast multivariate signature generation in the resource-limited environments, e.g.smart cards.