Abstract

Deterministic elliptic-curve signatures such as deterministic ECDSA and EdDSA have gained popularity over randomized ECDSA as their security does not depend on a source of high-quality randomness. Recent research, however, has found that implementations of these signature algorithms may be vulnerable to certain side-channel and fault injection attacks due to their deterministic nature. One countermeasure to such attacks is hedged signatures where the calculation of the per-message secret number includes both fresh randomness and the message. This document updates RFC 6979 and RFC 8032 to recommend hedged constructions in deployments where side- channel attacks and fault injection attacks are a concern. The updates are invisible to the validator of the signature and compatible with existing ECDSA and EdDSA validators.

Authors

John Preuß Mattsson
Erik Thormarker
Sini Ruohomaa

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