The past, present, and future of threshold Schnorr signatures

Chelsea Komlo (Waterloo) reviews the current state of the art in threshold Schnorr signatures. She discusses past security pitfalls in designing threshold Schnorr signatures, and how current state-of-the-art schemes came to be. She also reviews tradeoffs in achievable security guarantees versus performance overhead, and the difference between adaptive and static security. She finally reviews the current state of deterministic threshold Schnorr signatures, and discuss several open research problems for the future.

About the presenter

Chelsea is a cryptography and privacy researcher, and is a member of the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy lab at the University of Waterloo. She is a co-author of the FROST threshold signature scheme. Her current research involves multi-party cryptographic protocols, including threshold signatures, distributed key generation, and blind signatures. Before moving into research, Chelsea worked as an engineer on privacy and cryptography open source software, including Tor, Enigmail, and Off-the-Record (OTR) Secure Messaging.

About a16z crypto research

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