EdDSA

In public-key cryptography, Edwards-curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA) is a digital signature scheme using a variant of Schnorr signature based on twisted Edwards curves.

It is designed to be faster than existing digital signature schemes without sacrificing security. It was developed by a team including Daniel J. Bernstein, Niels Duif, Tanja Lange, Peter Schwabe, and Bo-Yin Yang.

The reference implementation is public-domain software.

Summary

The following is a simplified description of EdDSA, ignoring details of encoding integers and curve points as bit strings; the full details are in the papers and RFC.

An EdDSA signature scheme is a choice:

of finite field

F

q

{\displaystyle \mathbb {F} _{q}}

over odd prime power

q

{\displaystyle q}

;

of elliptic curve

E

{\displaystyle E}

over

F

q

{\displaystyle \mathbb {F} _{q}}

whose group

E

(

F

q

)

{\displaystyle E(\mathbb {F} _{q})}

of

F

q

{\displaystyle \mathbb {F} _{q}}

-rational points has order

#

E

(

F

q

)

=

2

c

ℓ

{\displaystyle \#E(\mathbb {F} _{q})=2^{c}\ell }

, where

ℓ

{\displaystyle \ell }

is a large prime and

2

c

{\displaystyle 2^{c}}

is called the cofactor;

of base point

B

∈

E

(

F

q

)

{\displaystyle B\in E(\mathbb {F} _{q})}

with order

ℓ

{\displaystyle \ell }

; and

of cryptographic hash function

H

{\displaystyle H}

with

2

b

{\displaystyle 2b}

-bit outputs, where

2

b

−

1

>

q

{\displaystyle 2^{b-1}>q}

so that elements of

F

q

{\displaystyle \mathbb {F} _{q}}

and curve points in

E

(

F

q

)

{\displaystyle E(\mathbb {F} _{q})}

can be represented by strings of

b

{\displaystyle b}

bits.

These parameters are common to all users of the EdDSA signature scheme. The security of the EdDSA signature scheme depends critically on the choices of parameters, except for the arbitrary choice of base point—for example, Pollard's rho algorithm for logarithms is expected to take approximately

ℓ

π

/

4

{\displaystyle {\sqrt {\ell \pi /4}}}

curve additions before it can compute a discrete logarithm, so

ℓ

{\displaystyle \ell }

must be large enough for this to be infeasible, and is typically taken to exceed 2200.

The choice of

ℓ

{\displaystyle \ell }

is limited by the choice of

q

{\displaystyle q}

, since by Hasse's theorem,

#

E

(

F

q

)

=

2

c

ℓ

{\displaystyle \#E(\mathbb {F} _{q})=2^{c}\ell }

cannot differ from

q

+

1

{\displaystyle q+1}

by more than

2

q

{\displaystyle 2{\sqrt {q}}}

. The hash function

H

{\displaystyle H}

is normally modelled as a random oracle in formal analyses of EdDSA's security.

Within an EdDSA signature scheme,

Public key

An EdDSA public key is a curve point

A

∈

E

(

F

q

)

{\displaystyle A\in E(\mathbb {F} _{q})}

, encoded in

b

{\displaystyle b}

bits.