A fast, compact and floating-point free post-quantum signature scheme.
Read the specification document (PDF)Hawk is a cryptographic signature scheme that is intended to be secure against both classical and quantum computers.
It was submitted on June 1st, 2023 to the Call for additional Digital Signature Schemes organised by NIST.
There are two isochronous implementations available: a "Reference implementation" and an "AVX2 Optimized implementation", which are in the submission package. For the source code, see the GitHub repo.
The procedures for generating and verifying signatures are fast on all devices, including low end devices.
Hawk-512 signature generation and verification take <0.1ms on an average desktop PC.
The keys and signature sizes are all rather small.
A Hawk-512 public key is 1024 bytes, a signature 555 bytes.
Hawk is free of floating-point arithmetic, i.e. CPUs do not need to support double.
Moreover, Hawk-512 only needs 14 kiB of RAM to work.
Hawk has the following private/public key and signature sizes.
| Hawk-512 | Hawk-1024 | |
|---|---|---|
| Targeted security | Level 1 | Level 5 |
| Private key size | 184 bytes | 360 bytes |
| Public key size | 1024 bytes | 2440 bytes |
| Signature size | 555 bytes | 1221 bytes |
Below, the performance of Hawk is listed. Speed is expressed in clock cycles, and RAM usage in bytes.
| Hawk-512 | Hawk-1024 | |
|---|---|---|
| Targeted security | Level 1 | Level 5 |
| Speed on a x86 ("Coffee Lake") with AVX2 (clock cycles) | ||
| Key pair generation | 8 432 840 | 43 660 958 |
| Signature generation | 85 372 | 180 816 |
| Signature verification | 148 224 | 302 861 |
| Speed on an ARM Cortex M4 (clock cycles) | ||
| Key pair generation | 52 316 870 | 225 658 496 |
| Signature generation | 2 801 495 | 6 179 673 |
| Signature verification | 1 418 539 | 3 006 983 |
| RAM usage (bytes) | ||
| Key pair generation | 14 336 | 27 648 |
| Signature generation | 4 096 | 7 168 |
| Signature verification | 6 144 | 11 264 |
26 September 2024
Minor additions added to the specification document.
17 July 2023
NIST announced 40 candidates in the first round of the “onramp” call for additional signature schemes. There are 6 other lattice-based signature schemes.
29 June 2023
The initial website is released.
1 June 2023
Hawk was submitted to the Call for additional Digital Signature Schemes organised by NIST.
The Hawk team consists of: