Tesla Coils & Corpses report, 2014-08-30, hash-based digital signatures

[Zooko Wilcox-OHearn]

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LAFS Tesla Coils & Corpses, 2014-08-30
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in attendance: Zooko (scribe), Daira, Andreas Hülsing, Arthur, Taylor, Christian

We talked about improved hash-based digital signatures. The question
is if we can strengthen the security even more than our previous
designs.

The goal is for the security to rest only on very conservative
assumptions about the properties of the underlying secure hash
function. We've already gone quite a long way on this, but we'd like
to even further strengthen it. If possible, we could define a
signature scheme so that *any* successful forgery attack against the
signature scheme necessarily implies a violation of the "Target
Collision Resistance" property of the hash function. (This is what
they call "provable security", but might be more usefully called
"using security reductions".)

We would, of course still require the "stateless" property of the final design.

Along the way, we're also exploring a few more tweaks that might help
in optimizing the performance.

Regards,

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn

Founder, CEO, and Customer Support Rep
https://LeastAuthority.com
Freedom matters.