The “learning with errors” (LWE) problem is to distinguish random linear equations, which have been perturbed by a small amount of noise, from truly uniform ones. The problem has been shown to be as hard as worst-case lattice problems, and in recent years it has served as the foundation for a plethora of cryptographic applications. Unfortunately, these applications are rather inefficient due to an inherent quadratic overhead in the use of LWE. A main open question was whether LWE and its applications could be made truly efficient by exploiting extra algebraic structure, as was done for lattice-based hash functions (and related primitives). We resolve this question in the affirmative by introducing an algebraic variant of LWE called ring-LWE , and proving that it too enjoys very strong hardness guarantees. Specifically, we show that the ring-LWE distribution is pseudorandom, assuming that worst-case problems on ideal lattices are hard for polynomial-time quantum algorithms. Applications include the first truly practical lattice-based public-key cryptosystem with an efficient security reduction; moreover, many of the other applications of LWE can be made much more efficient through the use of ring-LWE.

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Abstract. We provide an alternative method for constructing latticebased digital signatures which does not use the "hash-and-sign" methodology of Gentry, Peikert, and Vaikuntanathan (STOC 2008). Our resulting signature scheme is secure, in the random oracle model, based on the worst-case hardness of theÕ(n 1.5 )-SIVP problem in general lattices. The secret key, public key, and the signature size of our scheme are smaller than in all previous instantiations of the hash-and-sign signature, and our signing algorithm is also quite simple, requiring just a few matrix-vector multiplications and rejection samplings. We then also show that by slightly changing the parameters, one can get even more efficient signatures that are based on the hardness of the Learning With Errors problem. Our construction naturally transfers to the ring setting, where the size of the public and secret keys can be significantly shrunk, which results in the most practical to-date provably secure signature scheme based on lattices.

Abstract. Our main result is a construction of a lattice-based digital signature scheme that represents an improvement, both in theory and in practice, over today's most efficient lattice schemes. The novel scheme is obtained as a result of a modification of the rejection sampling algorithm that is at the heart of Lyubashevsky's signature scheme (Eurocrypt, 2012) and several other lattice primitives. Our new rejection sampling algorithm which samples from a bimodal Gaussian distribution, combined with a modified scheme instantiation, ends up reducing the standard deviation of the resulting signatures by a factor that is asymptotically square root in the security parameter. The implementations of our signature scheme for security levels of 128, 160, and 192 bits compare very favorably to existing schemes such as RSA and ECDSA in terms of efficiency. In addition, the new scheme has shorter signature and public key sizes than all previously proposed lattice signature schemes.As part of our implementation, we also designed several novel algorithms which could be of independent interest. Of particular note, is a new algorithm for efficiently generating discrete Gaussian samples over Z n . Current algorithms either require many high-precision floating point exponentiations or the storage of very large pre-computed tables, which makes them completely inappropriate for usage in constrained devices. Our sampling algorithm reduces the hard-coded table sizes from linear to logarithmic as compared to the time-optimal implementations, at the cost of being only a small factor slower.