What are MLSAGs, and what is their significance for Monero and/or RingCT?

Question

I've seen MLSAG mentioned in a couple places. I believe it has to do with the "signature" part of "ring signature," but I'm otherwise clueless. Can anyone provide more information?

Answer 1

MLSAG is an acronym for "Multilayered Linkable Spontaneous Anonymous Group". The MLSAG signatures are the type of signatures used by Shen Noether's Ring Confidential Transactions [1], based upon Gregory Maxwell's Confidential Transactions [2] and Nicolas van Saberhagen's Ring Signatures [3].

[1] https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0005.pdf
[2] https://people.xiph.org/~greg/confidential_values.txt
[3] https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf