After several months of cultivating the idea, socializing with others, and working closely with other developers and practitioners of multiparty computation (MPC) solutions, Sepior (acuiered by Blockdaemon in 2022) is proud to co-found the MPC Alliance.
Sepior initiated this effort because of our unwavering belief that MPC will profoundly improve the security, privacy, and innovation of online services.
MPC is a subfield of cryptography that has been a subject of research and development for over 30 years.
The first real world implementation of MPC was with the Danish Sugar Beet Auctions in 2008. The speed of execution of that initial MPC implementation was not particularly fast, but that was less critical to the application than maintaining the confidentiality and integrity of the auction bids. Since then, optimized implementations of MPC have improved performance by a factor of 1,000,000.
The result is that MPC which was once considered compelling, but too slow and computationally intensive can now be executed on devices such as a cell phone, in milliseconds. As a result, MPC is now applicable to a wide range of use cases, with profoundly compelling benefits.
Sepior’s application of MPC is in the area of distributed key management to address the requirements of increasingly distributed and decentralized online services. Our years of sustained focus and optimization have allowed us to develop native cloud-based Key Management-as-a-Service (KMaaS) implementations capable of supporting data security and privacy controls for millions of users.
More recently, our focus on securing signature generation, for transaction signing on public and permissioned blockchains now scales to support thousands of transactions per second, with unrivaled efficiency and security efficacy.
As pioneers in an emerging market, creating industry awareness and interest in MPC is a critical objective for all innovators of MPC-based solutions. The MPC Alliance is intended to unite a broader set of MPC technology developers and companies applying MPC in their businesses today to spotlight the use cases and the compelling benefits of MPC.
In some cases, MPC may simply provide a higher degree of security, or privacy than conventional alternatives. In other cases, innovative service providers will additionally recognize the potential of MPC to eliminate the past constraints of historically centralized security paradigms to unleash service innovation.
Achieving this level of security industry transformation starts with creating awareness and interest in MPC. So that’s where the MPC Alliance will initially focus. But to achieve MPC’s full potential we also need to identify and minimize or eliminate the barriers to rapid and easy adoption of MPC as a new technology. So the alliance will ultimately form both marketing committees and technical committees.
In the technical realm, our intention will be to focus on working with existing standards organizations (SO) to ensure that critical market needs are being addressed with the proper priorities. Since standardization efforts are already underway with NIST, IEEE, and soon ISO our hope is that the MPC Alliance can act as a liaison between SO’s and contribute towards timely and effective standards.
If the above sounds interesting and compelling to you and your company, we invite you to contact us through the MPC Alliance website to learn more and to join our cause.
