Ringtail: Practical Two-Round Threshold Signatures from Learning with Errors

A threshold signature scheme splits the signing key among$\ell$parties, such that any$t$-subset of parties can jointly generate signatures on a given message. Designing concretely efficient post-quantum threshold signatures is a pressing question, as evidenced by NIST's recent call. In this work, we propose, implement, and evaluate a lattice-based threshold signature scheme, Ringtail, which is the first to achieve a combination of desirable properties: (i) The signing protocol consists of only two rounds, where the first round is message-independent and can thus be preprocessed offline. (ii) The scheme is concretely efficient and scalable to$t\leq 1024$parties. For 128-bit security and$t=1024$parties, we achieve 13.4 KB signature size and 10.5 KB of online communication. (iii) The security is based on the standard learning with errors (LWE) assumption in the random oracle model. This improves upon the state-of-the-art (with comparable efficiency) which either has a three-round signing protocol [Eurocrypt'24] or relies on a new non-standard assumption [Crypto'24]. To substantiate the practicality of our scheme, we conduct the first WAN experiment deploying a lattice-based threshold signature, across 8 countries in 5 continents. We observe that an overwhelming majority of the end-to-end latency is consumed by network latency, underscoring the need for round-optimized schemes.