Python-Picnic is a Python reimplementation of the Picnic signaturescheme. Python-Picnic exists because i want to understand and learn the Picnic algorithm.

The Picnic reference implementation is in C under MIT license and can be found here:

Picnic Github

The Picnic paper is available at:

Picnic paper

This implementation is for the sole purpose of learning and understanding the Picnic algorithm. It's not recommended to use this code in productive environment. Additionaly this code is very slow, compared to the reference implementation (in C++).

• Python >=3.6
• hashlib including SHA3-SHAKE is needed (incl. in Python >=3.6)
• Additional package: BitVector

It's recommended to use a Python virtual environment like virtualenv. The BitVector package can be installed with

pip install BitVector 

This repository contains a description of the implementation as PDF in the /docs folder.

To run the tests with a testvector, simply execute

tests.py

This file is also a good starting point to see the usage of the Python-Picnic functions.