5 ms·

There is little information about what this is exactly on the site (but lots of words.) And since their proposal is just "TBC" at the moment, I'll see if I can

by kbaker 10y ago

There is little information about what this is exactly on the site (but lots of words.) And since their proposal is just "TBC" at the moment, I'll see if I can give it a shot... Milagro uses 'Pairing-Based Cryptography' to do better decentralization of trust. This concept was new to me, briefly it seems like it uses special constructs of elliptic curves to provide zero-knowledge proofs and Diffie-Hellman style key exchange. So, instead of using CAs and certificates to prove identity, this system would use indnividual pairings for authorization and would end up being more decentralized. With M-PIN that is a big part of this library, you can have signatures but also upgrade to full key agreement and PFS, with a standard protocol that has been around since 2002. What I am unsure about is how the decentralization will work, especially compared to just having CAs cross-sign keys. Seems like you will always need to ultimately have some trust anchor somewhere? Or can have a Perspectives-like 'network notary' system?

shawn-butler 10y ago
Milagro envisions a new class of cryptographic service providers called Distributed Trust Authorities, or D-TAs for short. The purpose of a D-TA is to independently issue shares, or fractions, of cryptographic keys to Milagro clients and servers and application endpoints which have embedded Milagro cryptographic libraries. D-TAs operate independently from each other, are isolated in totality, and completely unaware of the existence of other D-TAs. In practice, a Distributed Trust Authority (D-TA) framework would split the functions of a pairing-based key generation server into three services, each D-TA issuing thirds of private keys to distinct identities.