Digital signatures are typically required to be existentially unforgeable (EUF), ensuring that no adversary can produce a valid signature on a new message that has not been signed before. A stronger notion, strong unforgeability (SUF), also ensures that adversaries cannot forge new signatures on messages that have already been signed. These notions are well understood for plain signatures, but defining them for distributed multi-signature protocols, where multiple signers jointly produce a signature via an interactive protocol, is more challenging. While EUF has been studied for multi-signatures (using multiple competing definitions), there is no general definition for SUF, even though multi-signature protocols are often used to produce strongly unforgeable plain signatures.
This thesis introduces one-more unforgeability (OMUF) as a convenient way to model SUF in distributed signing protocols, and arrives at the following conclusions:
- MuSig and Bellare-Neven multi-signatures satisfy OMUF, even when the first signing round is pre-processed before the message to sign is known, but become completely insecure if the second signing round is also pre-processed.
- MuSig2 satisfies OMUF, which is important due to its widespread use in Bitcoin.
- The HBMS and mBCJ schemes do not satisfy OMUF, despite the fact that both schemes distributively generate strongly unforgeable plain signatures. Additionally, our analysis reveals an issue with the existential unforgeability of mBCJ, which does not contradict its original security proof.