Thetacrypt: A Distributed Service for Threshold Cryptography

TL;DR

Thetacrypt is a versatile, language-agnostic library that integrates multiple threshold cryptography schemes into a unified framework, facilitating the development and evaluation of distributed cryptographic systems, especially in blockchain applications.

Contribution

It introduces a unified, flexible library supporting diverse threshold cryptography schemes with a modular architecture and a benchmarking environment for performance evaluation.

Findings

Supports six cryptographic schemes across ciphers, signatures, and randomness.

Provides a flexible networking layer for peer-to-peer communication.

Highlights the importance of distributed considerations in performance benchmarking.

Abstract

Threshold cryptography is a powerful and well-known technique with many applications to systems relying on distributed trust. It has recently emerged also as a solution to challenges in blockchain: frontrunning prevention, managing wallet keys, and generating randomness. This work presents Thetacrypt, a versatile library for integrating many threshold schemes into one codebase. It offers a way to easily build distributed systems using threshold cryptography and is agnostic to their implementation language. The architecture of Thetacrypt supports diverse protocols uniformly. The library currently includes six cryptographic schemes that span ciphers, signatures, and randomness generation. The library additionally contains a flexible adapter to an underlying networking layer that provides peer-to-peer communication and a total-order broadcast channel; the latter can be implemented by distributed ledgers, for instance. Thetacrypt serves as a controlled testbed for evaluating the performance of multiple threshold-cryptographic schemes under consistent conditions, showing how the traditional micro benchmarking approach neglects the distributed nature of the protocols and its relevance when considering system performance.