Collective Authorities: Transparency and Decentralized Trust at Scale

The secret keys of critical network authorities---such as time, name, certificate, and software update services---represent high-value targets for hackers, criminals, and spy agencies wishing to use these keys secretly to compromise other hosts. In this talk, Philipp presents the concept of collective authorities (cothorities) which enables to decentralize authoritative systems thereby strengthening the overall robustness of such systems and providing a proactive approach to transparency that can either replace or complement existing (centralized) methodologies. His talk also highlights various applications of cothorities to areas like software updates, distributed randomness, and cryptocurrencies.

Code: https://github.com/dedis/cothority

Blog posts:

• Apple, FBI, and Software Transparency
• ByzCoin: Securely Scaling Blockchains

Research papers:

• Keeping Authorities ''Honest or Bust'' with Decentralized Witness Cosigning
• Enhancing Bitcoin Security and Performance with Strong Consistency via Collective Signing
• Scalable Bias-Resistant Distributed Randomness