A survey on threshold digital signature schemes

The security of digital signatures has been a focus of research in emerging area. Threshold signature is a technique designed for distributed scenarios, allowing the signing key to be divided into multiple shares. This approach can resist single point failures of device and ensure key security. However, most existing surveys on threshold signature schemes are either not comprehensive or cover only a limited range of signature types.

To solve the problems, a research team led by Debiao HE published their new review on 15 April 2026 in Frontiers of Computer Science co-published by Higher Education Press and Springer Nature.

The research team conducted an deeply investigation of various mainstream digital signature schemes based on ISO standards, including threshold signature implementations of Schnorr, ECDSA, BLS, and SM2, to explore the developmental status and research progress of different threshold schemes. The team classified these schemes according to structures of their base signature and threshold implementation challenges, then conducted multi-dimensional evaluations.

In terms of performance analysis, the study quantified communication rounds, communication overhead, and computational costs. Security evaluations focused on adversarial behaviors, hardness assumptions, and threshold setting. And functional assessments examined robustness and identifiable abort mechanisms. Finally, the investigation surveyed practical application scenarios and proposed potential future research directions.