Developers and practitioners of Multiparty Computation (MPC), announced today the formation of The MPC Alliance, an association of parties with a shared interest in improving the security and privacy of our personal and professional data through the application of privacy-preserving, secure MPC.
Founding members include: Curv, CYBAVO, Cybernetica, Enigma, Fireblocks, IJS Technologies, Insights Network, KeyTango, Offchain Labs, NuCypher, Partisia, Sepior, Unbound Tech, and ZenGo
The MPC Alliance was envisioned and initiated by Sepior, Unbound, and ZenGo. Alliance members represent a mix of developers of MPC-based products, and practitioners MPC-enhanced services. They share a belief that MPC materially enhances the security and privacy of online services and that accelerating adoption will benefit the industry at large.
MPC is applicable to a range of security and privacy use cases. One example is using MPC to protect the private keys used for generating a digital signature to approve transactions on blockchains.
“And, it’s not just about improving security in legacy settings. It’s about unleashing service innovation through new security and privacy paradigms that are better aligned with today’s more distributed and increasingly collaborative services. Such services can provide more compelling user experiences and operational efficiencies with distributed trust.”
– Yehuda Lindell, co-founder and chief executive officer of Unbound Tech
According to a recent Gartner report…“There are wallet technologies that support user custody and recovery using a self-managed private key, but these are too cumbersome to use and most blockchain application operators will not impose them on their users. Nonetheless, hackers are succeeding at gaining access to these centrally maintained private user keys using age-old techniques, enabling them to gain unauthorized access to bank accounts and other organizational assets. In addition, sometimes the threat arises internally from employees, especially in cryptocurrency organizations where vast amounts of money are stored and moved on a daily basis. This is particularly problematic because current implementations of key management — where private keys are centrally maintained — almost negate the benefits of secure cryptographic access that they enable. MPC addresses this significant problem using clever and secure mathematical algorithms that can sign transactions without the use of a private key at all. Multiple parties work together to execute a transaction based on a secure cryptographic operation.”
“MPC is a game-changer for multiple reasons. For starters, it provides the option to distribute trust, so that no one is entirely dependent on a single party that is subject to hacking or misbehavior. Distributing trust makes MPC-based systems inherently more secure and resilient.”
– Ivan Damgard, co-founder of Sepior, IACR fellow, and professor at Aarhus University
Multiparty computation (MPC) is a mathematical approach to digital security which reduces the dependency on trusted 3rd parties and physically secured devices to maintain the privacy and security of our digital footprints. MPC is a subfield of cryptography which allows multiple parties to compute an output using their private data without ever disclosing their data. It is capable of doing so while guaranteeing the correctness of the output even if some parties become corrupt.
