This post is about the paper “Improving security for users of decentralized exchanges through multiparty computation”, by Robert Annessi a

Securing private keys with a high-performance, threshold signature-based protocol

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2021-07-23 19:00:05

This post is about the paper “Improving security for users of decentralized exchanges through multiparty computation”, by Robert Annessi and Ethan Fast.

The paper introduces an effective algorithm for secure, collaborative signature generation using threshold signatures, and an API-key based client/server protocol that allows user-specific limits and restrictions as well as key revocations and rotations.

The method supports all blockchains that use ECDSA and EdDSA signatures, which includes Bitcoin, Ethereum and the majority of popular cryptocurrencies.

TLDR: Tired of dealing with private keys? Split it into two secret shares and require collaboration of two parties to generate the final signature, with neither party ever knowing the private key.

This setup allows any party to decline cooperation, providing a way to impose user-specific limits, restrictions and requirements for creating signatures, as well as the ability to permanently revoke keys. For one private key, many unique pairs of secret shares can be generated (2256 to be specific).