Announcing Blockdaemon’s Acquisition of Sepior

Today, Blockdaemon is proud to announce the acquisition of Sepior, a leading data and digital asset security company focused on institutional-grade cryptographic key management and protection.

This marks the fourth acquisition in Blockdaemon’s portfolio to-date. It follows the successful onboarding of three innovative companies within two years, including Gem, Anyblock Analytics and Lunie.

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Ahmet Tuncay Interview - Cybernews

With the rising number of cyberattacks, individuals and enterprises are already relying on cryptographic encryption solutions to prevent threat actors from obtaining private files or sensitive company data. However, the sudden expansion of cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and other decentralized financial (DeFi) services created a need for even more advanced security solutions in these new markets.

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Sepior
Attention Curv Wallet Customers - Change Brings Opportunity!

The March 8, 2021 announcement that PayPal agreed to acquire Curv was met by many in the industry with excitement, but for others concern. After all, it’s common for such acquisitions to lead to fundamental changes that require a new direction for the customers of the company being acquired. While change is never easy it also opens the door to new opportunities to select new solutions from the perspective of experience and insight on changing market requirements. As the original pioneer and industry leader in MPC and Threshold Cryptography (TC) schemes Sepior is helping many companies through this transition and stands ready to assist others.

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Balancing Compliance With US CLOUD Act and GDPR

In 2016, I wrote this blog on Lack of Trust in Big Brother. Since then, the U.S. Government created the Clarifying Overseas Use of Data Act (CLOUD Act), which introduces direct conflicts with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). While enterprise migration to the cloud has progressed quite extensively over the past five years, many companies continue to wrestle with how to maintain compliance with these potentially conflicting laws. Fortunately, improvements in key management to support Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) services can mitigate those conflicts for easy and compliant cloud migration.

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Minimize Ethereum Gas & Fees With MPC

Ethereum transaction fees have hit new highs in 2021. One of the factors is that the price of Ethereum has also hit new highs, but there’s much more to it. One way to minimize transaction fees is to use secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) for your multiple party approved transactions. In addition to minimizing the cost of your own transactions, you’ll maximize Ethereum’s throughput and contribute to reducing fees for everyone.

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BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) for clouds and regional compliance

Security professionals are tasked with protecting assets and services, maintaining compliance, and doing so cost-effectively. Clearly, this is a challenging task. The March 12, 2021 ruling by the Conseil d’Etat – France’s highest administrative court – is a perfect example of the balancing act that must be achieved. Fortunately, solutions exist to make this balancing act more manageable.

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Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) for Agile Enterprise Key Management

Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) is a technology that is gaining widespread interest for both data privacy and protection applications. This article focuses on the use of secure MPC to protect cryptographic keys used for practical enterprise key management applications.

Historically, key management is complex, inflexible, and expensive. Enterprises need key management solutions that …

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Sepior Key Management Secures Innovative New Social Media Platform

Instars, the pioneering decentralized and privacy-focused social networking platform, has integrated Sepior’s multiparty computation (MPC) key management to secure digital assets for the Instar Blockchain. Instars.com is the first social networking platform to use a combination of blockchain technology and secure MPC to provide innovative new social networking and personal data exchange services.

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MPC and Blockchain: A Match Made In Heaven?

In this three-part blog series, Professor Jesper Buus Nielsen, Chief Cryptographic System Designer at Partisia Blockchain, will examine the relationship between blockchain and secure multiparty computation (MPC). The first in this series will endeavour to lay out the foundations of this relationship, the second will ask ‘What can MPC do for Blockchain?’ and the final part will ask ‘What can Blockchain do for MPC?’.

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Sepior
Double Key Encryption of Office 365 - For When Trusting Microsoft Isn’t Good-Enough

Most of us have confidence in Microsoft’s ability to protect Office 365 content hosted in Azure. The consequences for Microsoft, and its customers, would be too high to tolerate anything less than industry-leading security. But what if Azure is compelled to provide access to sensitive content or to meet specific jurisdictional privacy regulations. This is where DuoKey’s recently announced key service, based on multiparty computation (MPC) is a game-changer.

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Blockchain and MPC Use Case: COVID-19 Tracking

Nations globally are under immense pressure to contain and suppress the spread of COVID-19. One of the resources required is an effective tool for tracking infected individuals, identifying other parties they’ve been in proximity with, and contacting them. Naturally, this exercise brings up the difficult balance between privacy and public safety.

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Department of Treasury Gives The Nod, But Are Banks Ready To Custody Cryptocurrencies?

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issued a letter on July 22, 2020 clarifying US national banks' and federal savings associations' authority to provide cryptocurrency custody services for their customers. This is a major step forward in bringing cryptocurrency to a place where more mainstream adoption is likely. The big questions are what’s different about providing custody of cryptocurrencies, and how will these mainstream institutions provide these services?

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Crypto Wallets 2.0, Improving Asset Security and Agility

In 2008, the same year that Satoshi Nakamoto published the famous Bitcoin white paper, a group of cryptography researchers in Denmark implemented the first production deployment of a technique known as Multiparty Computation (MPC). It was not obvious at that time, but MPC would ultimately become the basis for Crypto Wallets 2.0, ushering in an era of increased security for institutional- and consumer-grade wallets, with native support for any digital asset.

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MPC Minimizes Vulnerability of Non-Hardened xPub Key Derivation

HD wallets are a feature of bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies with the goal of providing improved privacy and usability. Compelling benefits can be achieved when using non-hardened key derivation. The problem is that if the private key corresponding to an xPub address is somehow leaked, then the private keys of *all* “siblings” and the parent can be exfiltrated. Multi-party computation offers a way to improve this state of affairs because a private key is never in one place (even when signing).

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Proudly introducing the MPC Alliance

After several months of cultivating the idea, socializing with others, and working closely with other developers and practitioners of multiparty computation (MPC) solutions, Sepior 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.

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.

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Yet another reminder, Account Security = Key Security

The announcement last week of Fusion Foundation’s $6.4M cryptocurrency theft was not major in terms of the magnitude of the loss on market scale, but it’s an important reminder that even the best secured wallets are no more secure than the security of the keys that protect them. The resulting loss of more than 80% in market cap value, (now improved to 40%) is also a reminder of the consequences to shareholders when such events happen.

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Mind The Gap - Enforcing Quorum Policies

A quorum policy is a policy which is used to ensure that different stakeholders approve of some transaction to remove the single point of failure which occurs when only one entity is needed to approve a transaction. Ironically, many ways of implementing such a policy will introduce a technical single point of failure in the very solution intended to remove the original point of failure. The solution is to have each approver provide their share of an approval signature using a cryptographic algorithm which natively generates the transaction signature only when the required number of approvals is satisfied.

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Turn-Key Simplicity Meets MPC Security

The recent announcement of the CYBAVO VAULT™ is an important milestone in the industry’s migration toward more secure, multiparty computation (MPC) -based cryptocurrency wallets and expands the rapid adoption opportunities to a far wider range of users.

Some of the industry’s largest and most technologically advanced financial services firms are implementing MPC to maximize transaction security on their exchanges and custodial wallets. (See the blog An Introduction to Threshold Signature Wallets with MPC) However,

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