On May 5th of this year, the EternaX Labs team announced a new post-quantum authentication scheme called SILMARILS (Compact Post-Quantum Authentication System for Cryptoasset Chain Systems) that generates digital signatures of just 160 bytes.
This development addresses one of the main issues of the post-quantum transition: the size of the signature compared to currently used systems.
Signatures standardized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are currently the most studied and analyzed. Each takes up between 690 and over 7,000 bytes.. As the signature size increases, so does the transaction size, increasing bandwidth, storage, and verification costs in crypto asset networks.
According to Dariia Porechna, a cryptologist and co-founder of EternaX Labs, SILMARILS avoids that “size tax” because: Acts as a signature by the designated verifiercertain network participants verify the authenticity of a transaction before reaching an agreement.
According to Porechna, after validating a transaction, the validator will publish a 32-byte receipt on-chain, which can be independently audited by a third party if an agreement is reached. As a result, the authentication fingerprint for each transaction is 160 bytes. 76% to 98% smaller than NIST standardized post-quantum signaturesdepends on the scheme being compared.
Can these signatures also be applied to Bitcoin?
Bitcoin allows any node on the network to independently verify that a transaction is valid. Use only public data on the chainIt does not rely on specific participants or designated verifiers as proposed in the SILMARILS scheme.
ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm) signatures currently occupy 70-72 bytes in Bitcoin and are designed precisely as follows: Anyone can verify its validity using the issuer’s public key.
SILMARILS works differently. Verification of authenticity is left to designated validators who act before agreement. Only then will the 32-byte receipt be published. External nodes cannot independently revalidate transactions using on-chain data. Trust validators to do their job correctly.
In the case of Bitcoin, whose design principle is to eliminate that very dependency, the incompatibility is structural rather than parameter-based. Polecina herself acknowledged in a statement that SILMARILS is not a direct replacement for standard public signatures.
Therefore, incorporate it into Bitcoin It will be necessary to redesign the network verification model through a hard fork. (protocol amendments) and reach broad consensus among developers.
(Tag Translation) Bitcoin (BTC)
