Breaking BASS
Simon-Philipp Merz, Kenneth G. Paterson, Àlex García · IACR Communications in Cryptology · 2025
We provide several attacks on the BASS signature scheme introduced by Grigoriev, Ilmer, Ovchinnikov and Shpilrain in 2023. We lay out a trivial forgery attack which generates signatures passing the scheme's probabilistic signature verification with high probability. Generating these forgeries is faster than generating signatures honestly. Moreover, we describe a key-only attack which allows us to recover an equivalent private key from a signer's public key. The time complexity of this recovery is asymptotically the same as that of signing messages.