Focus on digital asset security, KeyShard leads the private key revolution

“ In the whole life cycle, the real private key never appeared, thus fundamentally preventing the risk of the private key being embezzled or abused, and greatly improving the user’s control over the private key and the security of digital assets.”

At present, there are more than 2,000 types of cryptocurrencies in the world, with a market value of nearly 150 billion US dollars. Since the birth of digital assets represented by cryptocurrencies, digital asset theft and fraud have occurred from time to time, and with the improvement of criminals’ technical means, they are on the rise year by year.

Data show that $1.7 billion worth of cryptocurrencies were stolen and defrauded in 2018 alone, of which about $950 million were stolen from exchanges and related infrastructure. The total amount of cryptocurrencies stolen in 2018 was 3.6 times that in 2017 and more than seven times that in 2016.

In the face of the increasingly severe security situation of digital assets, traditional digital security protection technologies are increasingly difficult to meet the application requirements. For example, common:

Mnemonic, using a complex word list to restore the wallet. It is not so easy to remember, and anyone who finds this phrase can transfer digital assets;

Cold wallet, using offline devices to store private keys, and then connect to the network when signing transactions. If you want to support new types of digital assets, you need to update the firmware, which is less flexible;

Multi-signature, which rely heavily on smart contracts, and different main chains need to deploy different smart contracts. Compatibility is weak, risk factor, maintenance cost is high.

In addition, the current centralized digital custody method cannot achieve special account management, separation of transaction and custody, and is not very friendly to large institutional investors, making it impossible for large institutional investors to effectively confirm asset safety.

Under such circumstances, the PlatON team officially released KeyShard, the world’s first digital asset hosting service based on secure multi-party computing (MPC) technology, at the HashKey2019 Digital Asset Global Summit, bringing a new digital asset security solution that is both secure, flexible and easy to use.

At the meeting, Qu Junjie, Chief Technology Officer of PlatON, gave a detailed introduction to KeyShard in a fireside conversation entitled “Key Management: A Cryptographic Solution for Asset Security in Distributed Ledger” with Chen Li, CEO of HashQuark.

KeyShard uses a threshold signature based on a secure MPC. The private key is implicitly split into different shards and distributed among users, custodians and other participants. The real information of the private key cannot be obtained from any single shard. The assets are jointly controlled by all participants. The account adopts an arbitration strategy. When the private key needs to be called, there is no need to combine the fragments of the private key. When the number of participants exceeds the threshold, a signature can be distributed through the MPC for authorization.

In the whole life cycle, the real private key never appeared, thus fundamentally preventing the risk of private key being embezzled or abused, and greatly improving the user’s control over the private key and the security of digital assets.

At the same time, KeyShard also implemented two innovative functions.

Built-in recovery mechanism: The private key sharding part can be restored using MPC without changing the address. It allows users to say goodbye to difficult-to-remember “mnemonic words” without worrying about the loss of the private key.

Under-chain approval strategy is adopted: the strategy is hidden outside the chain, only one normal signature is used, and no intelligent contract needs to be deployed. Let the platform side “plug and play” for standardized rapid deployment, greatly reducing deployment and use costs.

PlatON has reached strategic cooperation with well-known platforms in the industry such as HashQuark, Keystore, and HashKey Hub to jointly promote the implementation and expansion of KeyShard’s technology applications. The PlatON team said that it will increase its research and development investment in KeyShard in the future and fully push the global digital asset security technology to a new level.