report from Twice-Weekly LAFS Dev Chat, Thu 2014-02-30

[Daira Hopwood]

On 20/02/14 21:30, Zooko Wilcox-OHearn wrote:
> in attendance: Zooko, Daira
> 
> Zooko was distracted by trying to get publicity for his startup
> (https://LeastAuthority.com) from this news:
> 
> https://spideroak.com/blog/20140220090004-responsibly-bringing-new-cryptography-product-market
> 
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7271030
> 
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1yg0ow/responsibly_bringing_a_new_cryptography_product/
> 
> Daira and Zooko tried to find a paper that they both vaguely
> remembered reading, which claimed to be a more intuitive,
> understandable explanation of Bleichenbacher and Maurer's scheme for
> asymptotically-better hash-based one-time digital signatures. They
> didn't find it, but they did find a paper by C. Dods, N.P. Smart, and
> M. Stam that claimed to improve on it.

In the Dev Chat I said that the Dods-Smart-Stam scheme claimed an asymptotic
improvement on the Winternitz OTS. Actually it doesn't; the efficiency
(defined as number of bits signed divided by number of hash computations,
roughly speaking) of the Dods-Smart-Stam scheme is (log_2 w)/w, whereas for
Winternitz it is t/2^t. But by setting w = 2^t, those are the same. So any
improvement is only by a constant factor.

-- 
Daira Hopwood ⚥

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