4 ms·
The Shortest Signatures Ever (2016) [pdf]
- lisper 7y agoThe signatures may be small (344 bits) but the keys are huge (tens to hundreds of kilobytes).
- tialaramex 7y agoBy itself that's a good trade if you need vastly more signatures than keys. I can imagine package management tools would accept much larger keys (maybe you have a dozen keys total in use at any time) for smaller signatures (every single package and metadata update needs signing). Of course other factors may dominate anyway.
- lisper 7y agoBig keys have significant practical consequences. You cannot distribute them as QR codes, for example.
- mratsim 7y agoCurious there is no reference to the BLS Short Signature scheme. While pairing-based cryptography is not quantum resistant (yet? Can we mix in isogenies in there?), the signature, secret keys and public keys are really small, for example with a 256-bit prime we're looking at 256-bit secret keys and 256-bit or 512-bit public keys/signatures (you can choose which one is bigger/slower depending on what you want to prioritize). It is also going into standardization right now: - https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-irtf-cfrg-bls-signature-00 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-irtf-cfrg-bls-signature-00 and will be a standard adopted across several blockchains (Algorand, Chia Network, Dfinity, Ethereum 2.0, Filecoin, Zcash to name those I am aware of).