Re:Milagro: Distributed Cryptosystem for Cloud Computing
by shawn-butler on Sunday September 18, 2016 @04:00PM
(#12526920)
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.
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?