BIP 445's det_nonce_hash commits to the secret share, my_id, u, the
sorted ids, the aggothernonce, the x-only tweaked threshold public key
and the message. It does not commit to the pubshares, to the untweaked
threshold public key, or to the accumulated tweaks. Because Q and -Q
share an x-coordinate, two tweak caches can agree on everything the
derivation hashes and still disagree on the sign g*gacc that multiplies
the secret share -- a cache initialized from thresh_pk and one
initialized from its negation being the smallest example.
Two calls differing only in that emit the same pubnonce and partial
signatures s = k + e*lambda*d and s' = k - e*lambda*d over the identical
k = k1 + b*k2, so subtracting them yields the secret share. Demonstrated
on a sole signer (u = 1, ids = {0}, pubshares = NULL) with thresh_sk =
0x11.. and msg = 0x42..:
tweaked pk (cache A) 4f355bdc...075871aa
tweaked pk (cache B) 4f355bdc...075871aa same x-only key
pubnonce A == pubnonce B nonce reused
sA - sB 0d7d9c4e...aa748ffa
-2*e*d 0d7d9c4e...aa748ffa d recovered
Nothing inside a single call can catch this. The self-verification that
Sign performs passes in both cases, because each partial signature is
individually valid under the cache it was produced with;
validate_session_params likewise only ties the pubshares to the cache's
own Q0, which both caches satisfy by construction. Note also that
pubshares is optional, so there need not be a second value to disagree
with.
No code change: this is the specified derivation, and committing to Q0
or to gacc here would diverge from BIP 445 and invalidate the
det_sign test vectors. The obligation is the caller's, so state it where
the caller will meet it -- in the function's own documentation and
alongside the existing secnonce and session_secrand32 rules in frost.md.
The rule is that the tweak cache and the pubshares are fixed key
material settled at key generation, never per-session parameters taken
from a coordinator or a peer; under that discipline a repeated call is
byte-identical and harmless, which is the point of a deterministic
nonce.
Worth raising against the BIP: the spec could close this by hashing the
untweaked threshold public key, at the cost of new test vectors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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