MPC Takes Digital Asset Security to New Heights

Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) has emerged as the technology of choice for managing and protecting the private keys used to secure digital assets on blockchain networks. Recent applications of MPC now expand the scope of MPC to include the policy layer, providing protection over the policies that control the use of private keys for increased security.

The first MPC wallets were publicly introduced in 2018. At that time, institutional grade digital asset wallets used multisig (multiple signature schemes) and hardware security modules (HSMs) to provide both multi-party approval enforcement and secure key signature services. The problem was HSMs were expensive and multisig required special on-chain programming, which is not universally supported across all digital asset protocols. MPC eliminated the requirement for costly specialized HSMs and introduced a simplified form of multi-party approval enforcement that works universally with all protocols, with no requirement for any on-chain programming.

Today, thousands of banks, custodians, exchanges, and institutional investors use MPC-based wallets to protect the private keys used to digitally sign multi-party approved digital asset transactions. As concerns over sustainable key security have decreased the concerns over the risk of policy hacks have increased. After all, one does not need to steal the private key if they can modify policies to allow fraudulent transactions to be approved by a single malicious party.

MPC enhances digital asset security by generating, storing, and using private keys in the form of distributed key shares. With MPC, key shares are never combined to create a complete key, eliminating the risk that a single party could become hacked, corrupt, or otherwise compromised to yield access to a complete key. The latest MPC-based enhancement to digital asset security is to apply MPC to protect the policy layer and the policies which control when private keys are used to digitally sign and approve transactions. Taking MPC up the stack improves key security and showcases the expanding scope of MPC.

Today, Blockdaemon introduced a new MPC wallet that applies MPC to provide security over both keys and policies. It also cryptographically binds a copy of all policies with each key share, eliminating the risk of blind signing that exists with many applications, including HSMs.

For more information on Blockdaemon and the latest MPC wallet security technologies we invite you to visit https://www.blockdaemon.com/blog/launch-of-blockdaemon-wallet-gives-institutions-full-uncompromised-control-of-their-digital-assets.