NIST has released a second public draft of its “First Call for Multi-Party Threshold Schemes” (NIST IR 8214C 2pd) and is seeking public comments through April 30, 2025. This call is part of NIST’s effort to gather information on advanced cryptographic techniques that allow multiple parties to jointly perform tasks like signing, encrypting, or decrypting data without revealing their private keys. These threshold schemes are designed to improve security by distributing trust across multiple participants.
The document outlines requirements for submitting materials related to these schemes, including specifications, implementations, and evaluations. Public feedback will help NIST create a characterization report that could lead to new standards or recommendations beyond current cryptographic practices. Anyone interested can submit comments via email, and all submissions will be made publicly available. The call also includes a section for patent claims, following NIST’s standard policy on including patents in its publications.
Keywords: Threshold Schemes, Cryptographic Primitives, Multi-Party Computation
