Towards a quantum-safe transaction signature in Ethereum

In order to maintain security, safeguard user privacy, and improve system performance, blockchain systems mainly rely on cryptographic techniques. Ethereum, for instance, controls currency ownership using the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), ensuring that only legitimate money owners may use it. However, growing concerns are being raised about how resilient implemented cryptographic algorithms will be to quantum attackers due to the advent of quantum computing. As a result, the previous computational hardness assumptions may no longer be valid. The key-pair generation and transaction signature are the blockchain parts that most need a quantum-safe approach. We provide an interface implementation of an Ethereum node for supporting different signature methods. Moreover, the interface presents functions to generate a key-pair, sign and verify transactions, extract a public key from the private one, and get an address from the corresponding public key.