A Comprehensive Survey of Threshold Signatures: NIST Standards, Post-Quantum Cryptography, Exotic Techniques, and Real-World Applications

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of threshold signatures, covering NIST standards, post-quantum cryptography, exotic techniques, and real-world applications, highlighting recent advances and future research directions.

Contribution

It systematically reviews threshold signature schemes across classical and post-quantum cryptography, including standard and custom designs, and explores their applications and exotic variants.

Findings

Threshold signatures are crucial for decentralized systems security.

The survey covers both generic and custom thresholding techniques.

It identifies key challenges and future research directions in the field.

Abstract

Threshold digital signatures enable a distributed execution of signature functionalities and will play a crucial role in the security of emerging decentralized next-generation networked systems and applications. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive and systematic survey of threshold and distributed signatures with advanced features. Our survey encompasses threshold signatures in conventional and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) settings and captures custom-design and standard signatures (e.g., conventional NIST and NIST-PQC). We examine both generic (via secure multi-party computation) and custom thresholding techniques for a myriad of signature families while investigating exotic signatures, real-life applications, and potential future research direction.