Initialization¶

Mathematical parameters must be chosen, such as a cyclic group and several generators for it.

In this implementation, the generators are determined deterministically by using a hash function. This eliminates the need to communicate the generators. It is vital that nobody has knowledge of the discrete logarith of any generator with regards to any other. Hopefully the below strategies meet the Rigidity property.

Ristretto255 group¶

The Ristretto255 group is built upon curve25519. Basically this eliminates the cofactor from curve25519, ensuring that all group elements are unique and generate the complete group. The group and its operations are designed to be used for zero-knowledge protocols such as PVSS.

Libsodium is used to carry out the various mathematical operations.

Generators are determined by computing HMAC-SHA2-512 over the DER encoding of the system parameters and the LaTeX notation of the generator name is used as the hmac key, i.e. "G_0", "G_1", "g_0", "g_1". The mac is passed through the point_from_hash function to determine the generator points.

The generators are:

• $$G_0$$: 3cc42cdf5ffc59a96093c572e6429ce8c621695d8f99156819701070c9895b02

• $$G_1$$: 76e9d24f586f4878f24d11069e1ab0420f20793f73d79d2a7b753c522ce8c468

• $$g_0$$: 90199c1a0446a5bb8fb88de3266e27b74565b14c74de153f8054302434040a7b

• $$g_1$$: 0cd425c734d93957091c5871eb2c1f8dd222c56310c4df58117bce9bf212d820

The Multiplicative group of quadratic residues modulo safe prime $$p = 2q+1$$ is commonly used for cryptographic operations, e.g. Diffie Hellmann. Useful property of quadratic residues are that they always generate the complete group, are easy to find (square any number) and it’s easy to determine if a given number is a quadratic residue with the Legendre symbol. The implementation uses gmpy2 to provide faster operations. Still, this group is very slow when compared to Ristretto255 and the message sizes are a lot bigger.
To determine generators, HMAC-SHA2-256 is repeatedly computed and the results concatenated until at least twice the bit size of the prime $$p$$ is reached. The LaTeX notation of the generator name is used as the key for the MAC operation. The input to the MAC is the previous MAC. As initial value, the DER representation of the system parameters is used. Finally, the concatenated MACs are interpreted as an integer and squared to get a quadratic residue, i.e. a generator for the group. The system parameters depend on the prime $$p$$, so there will be different generators for each prime.