Henry de Valence (Penumbra) would like to nominate Chelsea Komlo for her work on FROST, which has influenced his work a great deal.
FROST is a protocol that improves upon Schnorr threshold signature schemes in a number of ways, including these:
- FROST generates a signature in a single round with preprocessing (instead of two rounds)
- FROST is secure against forgery attacks (that other schemes are vulnerable to)
Furthermore, FROST comes with rigorous security proofs that the concrete protocol is secure. FROST is undergoing standardization as an IETF Internet-Draft, so that implementers can implement a well-specified protocol instead of reimplementing a paper.
Neat to see that @cwgoes has proposed that Namada’s custom ZCash bridge should use FROST multisigs:
From Chelsea’s blog:
I am a cryptography and privacy researcher. Currently, I am a member of the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy lab at the University of Waterloo. I am also the Chief Scientist for the Zcash Foundation and a Principal Researcher for Dfns. Before moving into cryptography research, I worked as an engineer on open-source security and privacy related projects.
Chelsea’s current and past research includes:
- Designing quantum-secure cryptographic primitives.
- Efficient threshold signatures.
- Improved privacy properties for multi-party signature schemes.
- Security of secret sharing schemes.