# How Not To Do BLS Signatures

The BLS signature scheme has several interesting properties, namely that the signatures are very short compared to any other known scheme, and it affords a simple implementation of threshold signatures and signature aggregation. For these reasons it has been of some interest especially in cryptocurrencies which can make good use of these properties.

The BLS scheme relies on an elliptic curve pairing $e$, which is without getting into implementation details is an operation that works on three groups conventionally termed $G_1$, $G_2$, and $G_t$, each of which have some (common) prime order $p$ and generators $g_1, g_2, g_t$ (resp). The pairing is a mapping $e(G_1,G_2) \rightarrow G_t$ which has the very useful property that $\forall x,y \in Z_p : e(x \cdot g_1,y \cdot g_2) = e(g_1,g_2)^{x \cdot y}$. In all known pairings, $G_1$ and $G_2$ are elliptic curve groups (so use multiplicative notation) and $G_t$ is your typical discrete logarithm group modulo a large prime, and uses exponential notation.

Given a pairing, the BLS signature scheme is very simple. Key generation consists of just choosing a random element $k \in Z_p$, and the public key is $g_2^k$. A message is signed by hashing the message using some function $H(\{0,1\}^\star) \rightarrow G_1$ and then outputting the signature $H(m) \cdot k$. Given a signature $s$ and a public key $g_2^k$, the verifier checks that $e(s,g_2) = e(H(m),g_2^k)$. [It is possible to switch the use of $G_1$ and $G_2$ here, but in practice one group has smaller elements than the other (conventionally, this is $G_1$) so it is better to have the public key be an element of $G_2$ to reduce the signature size to the minimum possible value.]

So, what can go wrong? In fact in contrast to most signature schemes, BLS is remarkably robust by design. Due to the lack of nonces, there is no possible issue of nonce bias or reuse, and signature malleability is not an issue. But there is a subtle flaw, namely in the definition of $H$. A naive definition of this function would be to choose some cryptographic hash function $C$ (say SHA-512), then define $H(m) = C(m) \cdot g_1$.

But this $H$ causes the scheme to fall to a very simple attack! Namely, given some public key and a valid message/signature pair, you can easily compute the valid signature for any other message. We know that $s = k*C(m)*g_1$, and we additionally know $C(m)$. So we compute $z = C(m)^{-1} \mod p$ and then $(z \cdot s) \mod p = k \cdot g_1$. Since we can't solve the discrete logarithm problem in any of the groups, this doesn't allow us to recover $k$, but it doesn't matter because for any other message we can compute a valid signature using $k \cdot g_1 \cdot C(m_2)$. This attack and several variations are described in a nice paper by Tibouchi.

Now, who would do such a thing? It turned out that ETH Zurich's "DEDIS Advanced Crypto Library for Go" implemented BLS signatures in exactly this way! I reported this issue to them on Feb 20 and a fix was proposed a week later.

Fixing this implies defining a new $H$ which does not lead to trivially computable relationships between outputs. The simplest and most general method is to to take advantage of the fact that it is possible to compute the square root modulo a prime. First hash the message onto $Z_p$ to find the $x$ coordinate of the elliptic curve point: $x = C(m) \mod p$. Then solve for $y$ using the Shanks-Tonelli algorithm to compute the square root modulo $p$: $y = (x^3 + ax + b)^{-2} \mod p$. But this doesn't always work, because not all values will have a square root. This necessitates a retry loop, for example by computing $x = C(m \| i) \mod p$ and incrementing $i$ until a valid $x$, $y$ pair is generated. Sadly this method introduces a timing channel, since the number of operations depends on the input: some inputs will find a valid pair after one iteration, some after two, some after 30 ... For some protocols, like BLS, the message can probably be safely presumed public, and this doesn't matter. But in other protocols such as password authentication key exchange, this input dependence can introduce a side channel and in fact was used to break WPA3.

Unfortunately there is not (to my knowledge) a known way of hashing to curve which is both secure against side channels and general, in the sense of being easily adapted to all commonly used elliptic curves. If you want to hash onto a BN curve you must use the techniques from this paper, for P-256 you use SWU technique, for P-384 you use Icart's technique, for x25519 you need Elligator and in general it's kind of a mess. The best solution in practice is probably to pick a single curve system wide and hope you never have to change it.