Simple-IT: Practical Low-Latency Signature-Free BFT Consensus (opens in new tab)

Recent advances in quantum computing pose a looming threat to most current Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols, which rely on quantum-vulnerable public-key signature schemes such as Ed25519 and BLS12-381. Instead of switching to much more expensive post-quantum secure signature schemes, an alternative is to use signature-free protocols, which rely only on cheap, post-quantum secure authenticated channels. In this paper, we ask whe...