frosix

Multiparty signature service (experimental)
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abstract.tex (1235B)


      1 In the future, almost everything would ideally be signed with cryptographic
      2 signatures to provide integrity, authenticity and non-repudiation.
      3 \custind The private signing key is the most crucial component for creating a
      4 signature and must be kept secret at all costs. But keeping a signing key
      5 confidential is a challenging task, often underestimated in the past.
      6 One of the main reasons for this is that any device could be compromised,
      7 making it insecure to handle a signing key on a single device.
      8 \custind The field of multiparty threshold signature schemes aims to address
      9 this problem using advanced cryptographic techniques. In a threshold signature
     10 system the signing key is distributed among $n$ parties, such that
     11 $k \leq n$ parties are required to generate a valid signature. The additional
     12 use of a distributed key generation ensures that the signing key is never
     13 constituted on a single device!
     14 \custind In this work, the authors provide a free software implementation of FROST,
     15 a promising threshold signature scheme.
     16 \custind As the device storing the necessary data to start a signing process
     17 can not be trusted, a Frosix service provider always conducts an authentication
     18 procedure before producing a signature share.