Paper 2020/1390

A Survey of ECDSA Threshold Signing

Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Adrian Hamelink, and Omer Shlomovits

Abstract

Threshold signing research progressed a lot in the last three years, especially for ECDSA, which is less MPC-friendly than Schnorr-based signatures such as EdDSA. This progress was mainly driven by blockchain applications, and boosted by breakthrough results concurrently published by Lindell and by Gennaro & Goldfeder. Since then, several research teams published threshold signature schemes with different features, design trade-offs, building blocks, and proof techniques. Furthermore, threshold signing is now deployed within major organizations to protect large amounts of digital assets. Researchers and practitioners therefore need a clear view of the research state, of the relative merits of the protocols available, and of the open problems, in particular those that would address "real-world" challenges. This survey therefore proposes to (1) describe threshold signing and its building blocks in a general, unified way, based on the extended arithmetic black-box formalism (ABB+); (2) review the state-of-the-art threshold signing protocols, highlighting their unique properties and comparing them in terms of security assurance and performance, based on criteria relevant in practice; (3) review the main open-source implementations available.

Note: Non-anon version

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
threshold cryptographysignatureECDSA
Contact author(s)
jeanphilippe aumasson @ gmail com
adrian @ hamelink com
omer @ kzencorp com
History
2020-11-10: last of 2 revisions
2020-11-10: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2020/1390
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2020/1390,
      author = {Jean-Philippe Aumasson and Adrian Hamelink and Omer Shlomovits},
      title = {A Survey of ECDSA Threshold Signing},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2020/1390},
      year = {2020},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1390}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1390}
}
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