- a digital signature provides integrity, authentication and non-repudiation.
- if trust is transitive, digital signatures can be used to build public key infrastructures (PKI). PKI allow trust to be reduced to a smaller set of keys.
- 1976 - Diffie and Hellman introduce the concept of digital signatures (in their seminal paper), but do not propose a solution.
- 1977 - RSA encryption and signature algorithm is published.
- 1982 - RSA company is founded by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman.
- 1985 - Elgamal introduces a new signature scheme based on the discrete logarithm problem in A public key cryptosystem and a signature scheme based on discrete logarithms.
- 1986 - Fiat and Shamir invent the Fiat-Shamir heuristic which transforms an interactive zero-knowledge proof into a non-interactive one.
- 1989 - Schnorr introduces a new signature scheme based on fiat-shamir and the discrete logarithm problem in Efficient Identification and Signatures for Smart Cards. Then later in 1991 in Ecient Signature Generation by Smart Cards.
- 1991 - DSA is proposed by the NIST
- 1994 - DSA is standardized in FIPS 186.
- 1998 - Schnorr writes about his signature patent covering DSA.
- 1998 - ECDSA, an elliptic curve version of DSA, is standardized by ISO, in 1999 by ANSI, and in 2000 by NIST and IEEE.
- 2001 - Dan Boneh, Ben Lynn, and Hovav Shacham release BLS, a deterministic and compressable signature scheme based on pairings.
- 2008 - Schnorr Signature patent expires.
- 2011 - Bernstein introduces EdDSA and Ed15519.
- 2013 - Porning standardizes deterministic signatures with ECDSA in RFC 6979, following techniques introduced by EdDSA.
- 2015 - Bernstein presents research on how elliptic curves can be backdoored with BADA55 curves
- 2016 - A security proof for ECDSA is found in On the Provable Security of (EC)DSA Signatures.
- 2017 - RFC 8032: Edwards-Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA) is published with two variants: Ed25519 and Ed448.
- 2017 - qDSA: Small and Secure Digital Signatures with Curve-based Diffie--Hellman Key Pairs
- 2018 - BLS makes a comeback for blockchain in BLS Multi-Signatures With Public-Key Aggregation
// * TLS: signatures are used as PKI, to provide integrity to part of the transcript, to authenticate ephemeral keys.