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Binance Smart Chain and Torus have collaborated to launch a new open-source system for safe and convenient threshold key management.
With the fast growth of cryptographic applications, key management has become an increasingly crucial subject. Mismanagement of private keys often results in considerable financial loss and the importance of key management today goes beyond financials to control of DAOs or even our identity.
Non-custodial private key management solutions have made significant progress to streamline the user onboarding experience, but have long been plagued by the trilemma of having to sacrifice security or redundancy for convenience. Many of these systems also have points of centralisation that reduce censorship-resistance, and these issues can be mitigated with the implementation of secret sharing schemes.
Through partnership with Torus, Binance Smart Chain furthers its commitment to open source initiatives, enhancing usability and improving security of the ecosystem by announcing tKey.
Introducing tKey
tKey is a model of threshold key management that solves the trilemma without sacrificing user experience, while retaining end-user autonomy and control. The model manages Shamir Secret Sharing (SSS) using the user’s devices, private inputs, and wallet service providers. Similar to 2FA systems, as long as the user has access to 2 out of 3 of their shares, they will be able to retrieve their private key.
This initial setup provides several benefits for users.
Key Features of tKey
Just like native private keys, tKeys are off-chain and thus composable with different blockchains and elliptic curves. By relying on native cryptography primitives, tKey avoids additional transaction costs. tKey is also compatible with on-chain constructions like multi-sigs and smart contract wallets, and can be used flexibly in conjunction with these systems for increased security.
In line with other threshold cryptography endeavors, tKey is a step towards improving key security in the community as a whole. Further work includes Threshold Signature Schemes with tKey so that the private key need not be reconstructed in the front-end when signing transactions.
Binance Smart Chain Chrome Extension Integration, Open Source SDK and Security Audits
Merging the best practices from proven key management models, tKey is the next step to lay the foundation needed for mainstream adoption of decentralised ecosystems.
For a start, users will soon be able to log in and set up their tKey wallet on the Binance Smart Chain Chrome extension and similarly on binance.org.
Developers can also expect the release of an upcoming open-source SDK of tKey, which they can integrate into their own key management systems to harness the benefits of threshold key management. Audits for the tKey SDK are pending and will be made available to the public in due time.
The full specification of tKey can be found here.