Unmasking TRaccoon: A Lattice-Based Threshold Signature with An Efficient Identifiable Abort Protocol

TRaccoon is an efficient 3-round lattice-based T -out-of-N threshold signature, recently introduced by del Pino et al. (Eurocrypt 2024). While the design resembles the classical threshold Schnorr signature, Sparkle (Crites et al., Crypto 2023), one shortfall is that it has no means to identify malicious behavior, a property highly desired in practice. This is because to resist lattice-specific attacks, TRaccoon relies on a technique called masking, informally blinding each partial signature with a one-time additive mask. del Pino et al. left it as an open problem to add a mechanism to identify malicious behaviors to TRaccoon.

In this work, we propose TRaccoon-IA, a TRaccoon with an efficient identifiable abort protocol, allowing to identify malicious signers when the signing protocol fails. The identifiable abort protocol is a simple add-on to TRaccoon, keeping the original design intact, and comes with an added communication cost of p60 `6.4 ¨|T |q KB only when signing fails. Along the way, we provide the first formal security analysis of a variant of LaBRADOR (Beullens et al., Crypto 2023) with zero-knowledge, encountering several hurdles when formalizing it in detail. Moreover, we give a new game-based definition for interactive identifiable abort protocols, extending the popular game-based definition used to prove unforgeability of recent threshold signatures.