Towards NIST Standards for Threshold Schemes for Cryptographic Primitives—A Preliminary Roadmap: Draft NISTIR 8214A Available for Comment

NIST invites comments on Draft NISTIR 8214A, Towards NIST Standards for Threshold Schemes for Cryptographic Primitives: A Preliminary Roadmap, which presents a structured approach for exploring the space of threshold schemes for potential standardization. The document discusses the need to consider the security, configurability, modularity, and capability for validation as features characterizing the schemes. The standardization process is organized into two main tracks—single-device and multi-party—and in each track, the threshold schemes may range from simple to complex in terms of standardization difficulty. With this draft, NIST is soliciting feedback from a broad audience to aid in the development of the roadmap. The document:

• Introduces the envisioned standardization effort
• Outlines a mapping of the potential standardization space into specification levels of domains, primitives, and threshold modes
• Considers application motivations for threshold schemes
• Discusses concrete primitives and threshold modes of interest in the multi-party and single-device domains
• Emphasizes the required consideration of several features when specifying criteria for concrete items
• Discusses the generic phases of development towards new standards
• Proposes and motivates high-level aspects of criteria and called for contributions from stakeholders
• Describes examples of motivating applications

A public comment period for this document is open until February 10, 2020. See the publication details for a copy of the draft and instructions for submitting comments.