cronokirby

(2026-03) Two-Party BBS+ Signature in Two Passes

2026-03-23

Abstract

The BBS+/BBS signature scheme is a key building block for anonymous credentials and privacy-preserving authentication and is currently being standardized and increasingly deployed in practice. To avoid the problem of single-point-of-failure, many threshold BBS+ protocols have been recently proposed for general tt-out-of-nn settings. In practice, however, a 22-out-of-22 policy between a server and a mobile device is sufficient to distribute trust while keeping the system lightweight. Yet, existing threshold designs still require at least three rounds/passes and multi-kilobyte communication in the two-party setting. In this work, we focus on the two-party setting and show that one can achieve reduced interaction while maintaining low computational and communication overhead. Specifically, we present a two-pass two-party BBS+ signing protocol that requires only 0.85KB of communication per signature, about 27% of the currently most bandwidth-efficient work (S&P'25) in the 22-out-of-22 setting. It achieves competitive signing times (roughly 62ms for one party and 46ms for the other) and remains efficient even for large message vectors (e.g., =500\ell = 500), making it attractive for practical deployments. Overall, our protocol is only slower than the fastest OT-based design (S&P'23) but uses nearly two orders of magnitude less bandwidth. We provide a full simulation-based security proof in the standard real-ideal paradigm. As an extension, our protocol can be generalized to a 22-out-of-nn threshold setting naturally.