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IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P)

Ringtail: Practical Two-Round Threshold Signatures from Learning with Errors

Cecilia Boschini, Darya Kaviani, Russell W. F. Lai, Giulio Malavolta, Akira Takahashi, Mehdi Tibouchi

Published May 12, 2025• 17 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A threshold signature scheme splits the signing key among$\ell$parties, such that any$t$-subset of parties can jointly generate signatures on a given message. Designing concretely efficient post-quantum threshold signatures is a pressing question, as evidenced by NIST's recent call. In this work, we propose, implement, and evaluate a lattice-based threshold signature scheme, Ringtail, which is the first to achieve a combination of desirable properties: (i) The signing protocol consists of only two rounds, where the first round is message-independent and can thus be preprocessed offline. (ii) The scheme is concretely efficient and scalable to$t\leq 1024$parties. For 128-bit security and$t=1024$parties, we achieve 13.4 KB signature size and 10.5 KB of online communication. (iii) The security is based on the standard learning with errors (LWE) assumption in the random oracle model. This improves upon the state-of-the-art (with comparable efficiency) which either has a three-round signing protocol [Eurocrypt'24] or relies on a new non-standard assumption [Crypto'24]. To substantiate the practicality of our scheme, we conduct the first WAN experiment deploying a lattice-based threshold signature, across 8 countries in 5 continents. We observe that an overwhelming majority of the end-to-end latency is consumed by network latency, underscoring the need for round-optimized schemes.

DOI
10.1109/sp61157.2025.00070

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A threshold signature scheme splits the signing key amongℓ\ellℓparties, such that anyttt-subset of parties can jointly generate signatures on a given message. Designing concretely efficient post-quantum threshold signatures is a pressing question, as evidenced by NIST's recent call. In this work, we propose, implement, and evaluate a lattice-based threshold signature scheme, Ringtail, which is the first to achieve a combination of desirable properties: (i) The signing protocol consists of only two rounds, where the first round is message-independent and can thus be preprocessed offline. (ii) The scheme is concretely efficient and scalable tot≤1024t\leq 1024t≤1024parties. For 128-bit security andt=1024t=1024t=1024parties, we achieve 13.4 KB signature size and 10.5 KB of online communication. (iii) The security is based on the standard learning with errors (LWE) assumption in the random oracle model. This improves upon the state-of-the-art (with comparable efficiency) which either has a three-round signing protocol [Eurocrypt'24] or relies on a new non-standard assumption [Crypto'24]. To substantiate the practicality of our scheme, we conduct the first WAN experiment deploying a lattice-based threshold signature, across 8 countries in 5 continents. We observe that an overwhelming majority of the end-to-end latency is consumed by network latency, underscoring the need for round-optimized schemes.
Threshold signature schemes enable distribution of the signature issuing capability to multiple users, to mitigate the threat of signing key compromise. Though a classic primitive, these signatures have witnessed a surge of interest in recent times due to relevance to modern applications like blockchains and cryptocurrencies. In this work, we study round-optimal threshold signatures in the post-quantum regime and improve the only known lattice-based construction by Boneh et al. [CRYPTO'18] as follows: - Efficiency. We reduce the amount of noise flooding used in the construction from 2^Ω(λ) down to √Q, where Q is the bound on the number of generated signatures and λ is the security parameter. By using lattice hardness assumptions over polynomial rings, this allows to decrease the signature bit-lengths from Õ(λ³) to Õ(λ), bringing them significantly closer to practice. Our improvement relies on a careful analysis using Rényi divergence rather than statistical distance in the security proof. - Instantiation. The construction of Boneh et al. requires a standard signature scheme to be evaluated homomorphically. To instantiate this, we provide a homomorphism-friendly variant of Lyubashevsky’s signature [EUROCRYPT '12] which achieves low circuit depth by being "rejection-free" and uses an optimal, moderate noise flooding of √Q, matching the above. - Towards Adaptive Security. The construction of Boneh et al. satisfies only selective security, where all the corrupted parties must be announced before any signing query is made. We improve this in two ways: in the Random Oracle Model, we obtain partial adaptivity where signing queries can be made before the corrupted parties are announced but the set of corrupted parties must be announced all at once. In the standard model, we obtain full adaptivity, where parties can be corrupted at any time but this construction is in a weaker pre-processing model where signers must be provided correlated randomness of length proportional to the number of signatures, in an offline preprocessing phase.
We propose a 2-round blind signature protocol based on the random oracle heuristic and the hardness of standard lattice problems (Ring/Module-SIS/LWE and NTRU) with a signature size of 20 KB. The protocol is round-optimal and has a transcript size that can be as small as 60 KB. This blind signature is around 4 times shorter than the most compact lattice-based scheme based on standard assumptions of del Pino and Katsumata (Crypto 2022) and around 2 times shorter than the scheme of Agrawal et al. (CCS 2022) based on their newly-proposed one-more-ISIS assumption. We also propose a "keyed-verification'' blind signature scheme in which the verifier and the signer need to share a secret key. This scheme has a smaller signature size of only 48 bytes, but further work is needed to explore the efficiency of its signature generation protocol.
A threshold signature scheme distributes the ability to generate signatures through distributed key generation and signing protocols. A threshold signature scheme should be functionally interchangeable, meaning that a signature produced by a threshold scheme should be verifiable by the same algorithm used for non-threshold signatures. To resist future attacks from quantum adversaries, lattice-based threshold signatures are desirable. However, the performance of existing lattice-based threshold signing protocols is still far from practical. This paper presents the first lattice-basedt-out-of-nthreshold signature scheme with functional interchangeability that has been implemented. To build ant-out-of-naccess structure for arbitraryt≤n, we first present a novelt-out-of-nversion of the SPDZ MPC protocol. For high concrete efficiency, we avoid using the MPC protocol to evaluate hash operations. Moreover, we design an efficient distributed rejection sampling protocol. As a consequence, the online phase of our distributed signing protocol takes only 0.5 seconds in the two-party setting and 7.3 seconds in the 12-party setting according to our implementation. As a byproduct, our scheme also presents a periodic key refreshment mechanism and offers proactive security.
Threshold signature schemes enable a group of users to collaboratively produce digital signatures without revealing any individual share. With the current NIST post-quantum standardization underway, the lack of efficient and practical threshold variants of standardized schemes hinders adoption. We introduce the first threshold signature scheme compatible with the ML-DSA standard (Module-Lattice-based Digital Signature Algorithm), supporting up to 6 parties, while retaining efficient signing. Our work uses advanced short secret sharing techniques and optimized rejection sampling to balance communication and correctness in distributed settings. We implement our construction in Go and benchmark it in local, LAN, and WAN deployments. Results show that our threshold ML-DSA is both practical and compatible with real-world applications such as multi-device cryptocurrency wallets, threshold TLS, and Tor's directory authorities.
Threshold signatures distribute trust across multiple parties, eliminating single points of failure and reducing insider and key-exfiltration risks—properties that are increasingly important for high-assurance deployments and recently emphasized by NIST’s Multi-Party Threshold Cryptography (MPTC) initiative. We present a practical t-out-of-n threshold variant and emulation of MAYO, a post-quantum signature candidate to NIST’s call for additional signatures. Our proposal builds upon the threshold MAYO design of Celi, Escudero and Niot (PQCrypto 2025), which we significantly refine to achieve practical performance. To this end, we introduce two algorithmic modifications to MAYO tailored for the distributed setting: (1) Explicit- Salt MAYO, which allows for pre-determined salts to enable a single-round online phase; and (2) Depth-Reduced MAYO, which restructures the signing algorithm to minimize the depth of secret-dependent operations. We then propose a unified protocol framework that integrate these techniques, plus other MPC specific optimizations, with the goal of minimizing online latency. Finally, we provide a concrete instantiation and local emulation in the dishonest majority setting, secure against active adversaries. Our emulation shows that threshold signing is practical at typical threshold sizes and amenable to deployment. By releasing an open-source implementation and reporting end-to-end performance, this work offers a concrete reference for the thresholdization of post-quantum signatures. Clearly the aforementioned framework is not limited to MAYO, and can be applied to the UOV family of signatures more generally.
Although they have been studied for a long time, distributed signature protocols have garnered renewed interest in recent years in view of novel applications to topics like blockchains. Most recent works have focused on distributed versions of ECDSA or variants of Schnorr signatures; however, and in particular, little attention has been given to constructions based on post-quantum secure assumptions like the hardness of lattice problems. A few lattice-based threshold signature and multi-signature schemes have been proposed in the literature, but they either rely on hash-and-sign lattice signatures (which tend to be comparatively inefficient), use expensive generic transformations, or only come with incomplete security proofs. In this paper, we construct several lattice-based distributed signing protocols with low round complexity following the Fiat–Shamir with Aborts (FSwA) paradigm of Lyubashevsky (Asiacrypt 2009). Our protocols can be seen as distributed variants of the fast Dilithium-G signature scheme and the full security proof can be made assuming the hardness of module SIS and LWE problems. A key step to achieving security (unexplained in some earlier papers) is to prevent the leakage that can occur when parties abort after their first message—which can inevitably happen in the Fiat–Shamir with Aborts setting. We manage to do so using homomorphic commitments. Exploiting the similarities between FSwA and Schnorr-style signatures, our approach makes the most of observations from recent advancements in the discrete log setting, such as Drijvers et al.’s seminal work on two-round multi-signatures (S&P 2019). In particular, we observe that the use of commitment not only resolves the subtle issue with aborts, but also makes it possible to realize secure two-round n -out-of- n distributed signing and multi-signature in the plain public key model , by equipping the commitment with a trapdoor feature. The construction of suitable trapdoor commitment from lattices is a side contribution of this paper.