Fundamental Technology
Silent Shard has been built using a cryptographic base of Multiparty computation (MPC). MPC enables a set of parties that do not trust each other to try to jointly compute a function (signature generation in this case) over their inputs (shards of the keys in this case) while keeping those inputs privately stored with them. Threshold signatures are a case enabled by multiparty computation where the function to be computed is a cryptographic digital signature. ECDSA is one type of such a signature scheme based on elliptic curves. ECDSA is used in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and across the industry. As such, the algorithm’s varied constructs support other variants of signatures and curves as well, such as EdDSA and others.
TSS functions involve cryptographic computing at the participating nodes of the MPC quorum and exchanges of rounds of messages which ultimately lead to the generation of a valid signature at the requested node. These computing nodes can be any device with sufficient computational and memory capability, including but not limited to smartphones, server nodes, and edge devices. The basic philosophy behind Silent Shard remains that no single device holding the private key can be used to generate signatures and move digital assets. The private key is shared among multiple computing nodes so that no party has any information about the key. Then, in order to generate a signature, the threshold number of devices run a secure multi-party computation protocol that generates the signature without revealing anything about the parties' key shares to each other. These devices may or may not be associated with the same person or organization and can be any form factor. Thus, one could use this to create a wallet, sharing the private key between one's mobile and one's laptop, between one's mobile and a VM in the cloud, and so on.
The details of DKG and Distributed Signature for HTSS (a generalized case of threshold signature with elements of hierarchy) are mentioned in the white paper by Silence Laboratories below:
The reference papers for the White Paper are:
Simple Three-Round Multiparty Schnorr Signing with Full Simulatability by Yehuda Lindell,
Link to the paper:
Fast Multiparty Threshold ECDSA with Fast Trustless Setup by Rosario Gennaro and Steven Goldfeder
Link to the paper:
Silent Shard's latest libraries are based on one of the fastest TSS Protocol: DKLS
A Multiparty Computation Approach to Threshold ECDSA by Jack Doerner, Yashvanth Kondi, Eysa Lee, and abhi shelat.
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