Re: [Cfrg] BLS standard draft

[Tony Arcieri <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 3:52 AM Michael Scott <[e-mail]> wrote:

> 1) Pairing-based crypto threw open the doors to lots of nice new crypto
> possibilities, enabling stuff that we couldn't do before
> 2) Gradually post-quantum crypto is catching up and demonstrating
> capabilities that mirror some (but not all) of these achievements
>

I'd agree with this: it is great people are working on post-quantum
cryptography, but I do not view the threat as particular urgent (i.e. 10+
years away, if ever), and therefore think it makes sense to continue to
work on pre-quantum and post-quantum schemes in parallel.

Furthermore I'd like to add that pairings-based signature schemes like this
have somewhat unique and highly useful properties around offline signature
aggregation and small signature sizes. At least to my knowledge, there is
no post-quantum secure equivalent of bilinear pairings (perhaps I'm
mistaken?), so if we focus exclusively on post-quantum schemes we leave all
of these benefits on the table, even in the event large QCs capable of
attacking this class of elliptic curve prove to be intractable.

-- 
Tony Arcieri