CryptoDB
No More Guesswork: Ready-to-Use Distributed Key Generation
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| Presentation: | Slides |
| Abstract: | While cryptographic systems gravitate toward more decentralized and distributed architectures, threshold signatures are gaining considerable renewed attention. Yet, Distributed Key Generation (DKG), with its heavy requirements on the underlying communication mechanisms such as secure channels and a secure broadcast mechanism, remains the Achilles heel of threshold signatures and holds back their deployment in the real world. In this talk, we will first take a detailed look at the obstacles that implementers and practitioners face in practice. We will foster an understanding of potential pitfalls and attacks, in particular those that can arise from the (mis)use of reliable broadcast protocols. We will then provide recommendations and guidelines on how to avoid these pitfalls and implement broadcast securely in practice. A key technical ingredient in our recommendations is a simple extension of the Goldwasser-Lindell echo broadcast protocol, which we have not seen proposed in the context of DKG so far. With these learnings in mind, we present ChillDKG, a DKG protocol that fully incorporates minimal but sufficient implementations of secure channels and reliable broadcast, and thereby hides this complexity from engineers entirely. The protocol addresses further practical problems by eliminating the need for fresh randomness per threshold setup and offering a practical solution for backups. To facilitate real-world adoption of this ChillDKG protocol, we have been working on a publicly available specification that aims to be comprehensive and easy to use. While our talk is geared towards Schnorr (incl. EdDSA) signatures, the main insights and learnings we present are equally applicable to other settings where DKG is required, e.g., BLS threshold signatures or threshold encryption. |
| Video: | https://youtu.be/CfQof5s-jJY |
BibTeX
@misc{rwc-2025-35891,
title={No More Guesswork: Ready-to-Use Distributed Key Generation},
note={Video at \url{https://youtu.be/CfQof5s-jJY}},
howpublished={Talk given at RWC 2025},
author={Jonas Nick and Tim Ruffing},
year=2025
}