[Cfrg] Suggestions for draft-hao-schnorr

[Robert Ransom <[e-mail]>]

draft-hao-schnorr-00 is incorrectly labeled as describing the ‘Schnorr
signature’.  The protocol it describes is a non-interactive proof of
knowledge of a discrete logarithm, as required by J-PAKE (and other
protocols); the Schnorr signature IS NOT a proof of knowledge.

In the notation used in the draft, the original Schnorr signature (as
described by Wikipedia, ‘Applied Cryptography’, and a PDF file from
somewhere on the Internet claiming to be a 1991 paper by Schnorr) uses
h = H(Message || g^v).  With that choice of h, an attacker can choose
V with unknown discrete logarithm, choose r and Message arbitrarily,
and compute the X for which the signature is valid; the attacker (and
anyone else who sees the signature) will know the discrete logarithm
of X with respect to V, but not with respect to g.

I suggest replacing “Schnorr signature” with “Schnorr proof of
knowledge” in the titles of Section 4 and the draft itself, and adding
text in the draft warning about the difference between the PoK and the
original signature scheme, to try to reduce the risk that someone will
break a protocol by substituting the original (non-PoK) Schnorr
signature for the PoK you are describing.

(I don't believe that using the original Schnorr signature in J-PAKE
would break J-PAKE's security, but it's certainly not a good thing to
do.)


The draft must specify that implementations MUST choose v *uniformly*
at random from Z/qZ, and MUST NOT use the same v for more than one
signature.  (See section 2, subsection ‘Pseudorandom generation of r’
(on pages 8 and 9) of <http://ed25519.cr.yp.to/ed25519-20110926.pdf>
for reasons and references.)  The draft should specify that
implementations which use long-term signing keys SHOULD arrange to
generate v in a secretly deterministic manner, and protocols in which
long-term signing keys may need to be interoperable between
implementations MUST specify the details of deterministic generation
of v and storage and transport of any extra key material required for
that purpose.


Robert Ransom