Bitcoin researchers focus on adopting "hash-based signatures" for quantum-resistant upgrades

PANews December 12 News, according to DL News reports, in a revised paper published on December 5, Blockstream researchers Mikhail Kudinov and Jonas Nick explored various methods to upgrade the Bitcoin blockchain to make it resistant to quantum attacks. They believe that hash-based signatures are a highly attractive post-quantum solution because their security relies only on hash function assumptions similar to those underlying Bitcoin’s design. Kudinov introduced his research findings in an email to the Bitcoin developer mailing list, stating: “These schemes have undergone extensive cryptanalysis during the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) post-quantum standardization process, which increases confidence in their robustness.” Hash-based signatures rely on hash functions, which are considered to have quantum resistance because, unlike the public key encryption technology used by Bitcoin, quantum algorithms are not easily able to crack hash functions. Hash functions can be made resistant to brute-force searches by quantum computers simply by increasing the output size, making the search space too large and thus securing applications like digital signatures. However, how developers will implement hash-based signatures is still under discussion. Issues such as maintaining low verification costs, whether to standardize multiple hash-based signature implementations, and whether the entire network’s history is needed to verify transactions all require decisions.