Beyond Basic Trust: Envisioning the Future of NextGen Networked Systems and Digital Signatures

Authentication and integrity are foundational security services for trustworthy systems and the prerequisite of privacy preservation. At the heart of these services lies digital signatures, widely deployed in real-life applications and supported by various standards. Yet, newly emerging next-generation (NextG) networked systems are vastly distributed, include many resource-limited components, and demand advanced features such as privacy, anonymity, and post-quantum (PQ) security. However, the current signature standards and specialized signatures only meet some of these important requirements in isolation. Hence, there is a significant gap in the state-of-the-art in identifying the needs of emerging networked systems and synergizing them with the features of advanced signatures. In this work, we strive to mitigate this gap by uniting burgeoning ubiquitous systems with advancements in digital signatures and then envisioning the trust via signatures with extended features for NextG networked systems. We investigate the current signature standardizations and advanced constructions for their potentials and drawbacks in three essential aspects of NextG networks - decentralized, privacy-preserving, and resource-constraint settings. We first analyze threshold cryptography efforts proffered by NIST, both from secure multi-party computation and custom design constructions, with applications on distributed systems like blockchains, federated cloud, and NextG Public Key Infrastructures (PKIs) in mind. We then investigate the intersections of distributed signatures and privacy-preservation techniques for privacy-sensitive NextG applications (e.g., medical, cryptocurrency). We also focus on research gaps for resource and time-limited systems and identify suitable signatures to remedy this gap for security-critical applications (e.g., vehicular networks, smart grids). Finally, we discuss potential directions for these ubiquitous NextG systems and advanced signatures in the PQ era. We expect that our vision contributes to the narrowing of the gap in NextG networked applications and emerging digital signatures, thereby aiding practitioners and field experts to lay the foundations of authentication services for NextG systems.