September 18-20, 2024 | DoubleTree by Hilton, San Jose, California

NIST Call for Multi-Party Threshold Schemes: Brief Notes at ICMC 2023 (G30a)

21 Sep 2023
09:00

NIST Call for Multi-Party Threshold Schemes: Brief Notes at ICMC 2023 (G30a)

NIST issued in January of 2023 the initial public draft of a Call for Multi-Party Threshold Schemes (NISTIR 8214C ipd). This is a process toward collection of reference material on threshold schemes for multiple primitives, where the secret/private key is secret-shared across multiple devices (such as cryptographic modules). The future submissions encouraged in this call should include security characterization, technical description, open-source implementation, and performance evaluation. Notably, with respect to the primitives of interest for thresholdization, the call has a wide scope composed of two categories: one (Cat1) for selected NIST-standardized primitives; and another (Cat2) for primitives not standardized by NIST. In particular, Cat2 extends to primitives from schemes with advanced features, such as fully-homomorphic encryption, identity-based encryption, and zero-knowledge proofs, besides “gadgets” supportive of multi-party computation. The process is also expected to clarify the current state of (in)compatibility between quantum-resistance, threshold-friendliness and advanced features.

This talk will summarize the scope and structure of the call, explain the improvement edits introduced since the initial public draft, and the opportunities for collaboration with stakeholders. The overall dissemination of this initiative to stakeholders is important to promote collaboration across various phases: feedback about the call; submissions of concrete threshold schemes; analysis of submitted schemes.