Circulant UOV: a new UOV variant with shorter private key and faster signature generation

UOV is one of the most important signature schemes in Multivariate Public Key Cryptography (MPKC). It has a strong security guarantee and is considered to be quantum-resistant. However, it suffers from large key size and its signing procedure is relatively slow. In this paper, we propose a new secure UOV variant (Circulant UOV) with shorter private key and higher signing efficiency. We estimate that the private key size of Circulant UOV is smaller by about 45% than that of the regular UOV and its signing speed is more than 14 times faster than that of the regular UOV. We also give a practical implementation on modern x64 CPU, which shows that Circulant UOV is comparable to many other signature schemes.