🫓Silent Shard: MPC-TSS @SL
Silent Shard is a key enabler for Decentralized Authentication Infra for Key Management, Distributed Signatures, and Access Policies
Silent Shard is an MPC-Threshold Signature and Key Management Library from Silence Laboratories.
We are enabling enterprises and communities to adopt decentralised security paradigms through our cryptographic libraries built with multi-party computation (MPC)- Threshold Signatures and a processing-based layer of proofs as its core.
What is Silent Shard?
Silent Shard is the go-to library for threshold signature adoption. It supports the inclusion of usable, secure, and truly decentralized signature schemes by digital wallets, exchanges, and Sign Ins for Web3/Web2. Web3 has seen a major contrast compared to web2, wherein proving possession of the private keys is the only way to verify association/access/claim for an account. In order to protect such a system, Silent Shard derives its name from the concept of sharding (splitting) private keys into portions such that a single point of failure (theft of private keys as a whole) is ruled out.
Fundamentals
Secrets and Keys are split into shares/shards and stored across different computing nodes (phone as token/wallet, browser, enterprise servers, edge devices etc.).
During Signature Generation, the nodes communicate as a challenge-response protocol and generate signatures without actually combining the shares.
At no point in the life of the system, the complete private key is exposed. Even if a node is compromised, it won’t expose anything about the private key and capabilities to produce a valid signature.
What’s the concern? And why do Crypto Wallets and Exchanges need special attention?
“Banks of web2 world have undo buttons. Web3, Blockchains based applications, do not support that luxury due to their inherent nature.”
Wallets and exchanges have been under the radar of theft and the scale and the nature of compromises have been growing over the past five years.
Cyber attacks against cryptocurrency exchanges are seemingly on the rise. Last month, BTC-Alpha confirmed it was the victim of a ransomware attack. Though BTC-Alpha founder Vitalii Bodnar said no hashed passwords were comprised and users' balances were not impacted, users cited issues with logging in and not being able to withdraw funds [7]. Group-IB, an international company that specializes in preventing cyber attacks, has estimated that cryptocurrency exchanges suffered a total loss of $882 million due to targeted attacks in 2017 and in the first three quarters of 2018. According to Group-IB experts, at least 14 crypto exchanges were hacked. Five attacks have been linked to North Korean hackers from Lazarus state-sponsored group, including the infamous attack on Japanese crypto exchange Coincheck, when $534 million in crypto was stolen [8]. A brazen robbery by crypto hackers cost users of a DeFi platform a collective $610 million, but only for a little while. Claiming that it was just a demonstration of a vulnerability, the hackers have since returned all but $33 million in assets. A detailed list of the recent attacks is enumerated on the following page.
Security concerns with the wallets and exchanges are critical problems and have quantifiably has contributed to the loss of nearly 20% of all Bitcoins in circulation.
Wallets and Exchanges are facing severe thefts and attacks due to imbalance in user experience and levels of security.
Silent Shard comes as a one-stop, ready-to-integrate and deploy, set of libraries for ruling out possibilities of mentioned attack vectors.
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