Equivocation-resistant multiparty digital signature for quantum networks

Abstract

Digital signatures are a critical cryptographic primitive requiring quantum-safe solutions. One possibility are quantum digital signatures (QDS), which offer information-theoretic (IT) security without a trusted authority. However, even the most promising QDS proposals are largely limited to the tripartite scenario (one sender, two receivers) and are vulnerable to equivocation-based attacks that hinder transferability and non-repudiation. To overcome such limitations, we introduce an equivocation-resistant signature (ERS) protocol based on preshared keys and universal hashing that achieves IT security and scales to an arbitrary number of receivers. We benchmark the ERS protocol against state-of-the-art QDS schemes, namely [Amiri et al., 2018] for the multi-receiver scenario and [Yin et al., 2023] and [Garcia Cid et al., 2025] for the tripartite case, demonstrating orders-of-magnitude reductions in preshared key consumption and signature size. The superior performance of the ERS protocol is also validated in a field test on the Rome quantum metropolitan area network, reaching a rate of 13 signatures per second for one-megabit documents shared among five parties. Our findings position our ERS protocol as a strong candidate for implementing IT-secure digital signatures in today's quantum communication infrastructures.

The manuscript is heavily reworked with respect to v1. Here we introduce a multi-partite digital signature protocol together with a security proof, we benchmark its performance with respect to comparable schemes, and experimentally test it on the Rome quantum metropolitan area network