BLS Multi-Signatures for Blockchain Applications

BLS (Boneh–Lynn–Shacham) signatures have recently seen an increased adoption in the blockchain setting due to a set of useful properties, including efficient multi-signing with signature / public-key aggregation. In this talk, Foteini Baldimitsi (George Mason) discusses two new constructions of BLS multisignatures and their blockchain applications. In the first part, she presents BLS blind multi-signatures and the application of decentralized anonymous tokens (single use tokens that are issued in a decentralized way and have efficient presentation protocols). In the second part, she discusses a subset-optimized BLS multisignatures, a scheme best suited to applications like Proof-of-Stake (PoS), where the full set of potential signers is fixed and known and any subset of this group can create a multisignature over a message.

About the speaker

Foteini is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at George Mason University and member of the cryptography research team at Mysten Labs. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University in May 2014 and worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Boston University and University of Athens. Her research interests are in the areas of cryptography, security and data privacy. She focuses on designing provably secure cryptographic schemes for a variety of applications such as privacy preserving identity management and private and scalable blockchain transactions. She is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award as well as Google, IBM and Facebook faculty awards. Her research is funded by NSF, DHS, NSA, CCI, Protocol Labs, and the Zcash Foundation.

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