What is it about?

The growing interconnection of critical systems, from healthcare and finance to transportation and government networks, demands cryptographic solutions that can remain secure even as technology evolves. Threshold signatures are an essential part of this effort, designed to mitigate systemic risks caused by centralized key compromise. They address this by dividing a private key among multiple independent parties, ensuring that no single compromise can result in unauthorized operations. This distributed trust model strengthens the resilience of systems such as the digital banking platforms and cryptocurrency networks. At the same time, the rapid advancement of quantum computing poses a new challenge to current cryptographic standards. Quantum-capable adversaries could potentially break many of today’s widely used public key systems, making the transition to post-quantum security a global priority. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has recently standardized several post-quantum digital signature algorithms, including ML-DSA (FIPS 204), SLH-DSA (FIPS 205), and FN-DSA (FIPS 206, forthcoming). Together, threshold signatures and post-quantum cryptography form a foundation for trustworthy digital infrastructures, enabling secure, distributed, and quantum-resistant communication across the connected world.

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Why is it important?

In traditional cryptographic systems, a single private key typically governs access to critical functions such as authentication and digital signing. When such a key is compromised, as seen in notable incidents like the DigiNotar and Comodo breaches, the resulting breakdown of trust can cascade across entire sectors, jeopardizing national security and financial stability (e.g., Billion-dollar losses). Strengthening resilience against key compromise is therefore essential to maintaining digital trust.

Perspectives

With the recent standardization efforts led by NIST, there has been a significant surge in research focused on developing post-quantum-secure threshold signature schemes. However, this area still lacks strong foundational work compared to classical threshold signatures, both because it is relatively new and because extending existing techniques to the post-quantum domain is inherently challenging. Moreover, considering side-channel attacks is of critical importance in distributed settings, as such attacks can leak sensitive information even without direct key compromise. Hence, investigating side-channel resistance within post-quantum threshold signature constructions is an important and necessary direction for ensuring robust security in practical deployments.

Kiarash Sedghighadikolaei
University of South Florida

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This page is a summary of: A Survey of Threshold Signatures: NIST Standards, Post-Quantum Cryptography, Exotic Techniques, and Real-World Applications, ACM Computing Surveys, December 2025, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3772274.
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