Sepior ApS announced Sepior Threshold KMS, the industry’s first commercially available threshold key management system based on threshold multiparty computation (MPC) for controlling privacy on blockchains.
Sepior Threshold KMS addresses a critical requirement of nearly every permission based blockchain provider to control access to information by potentially wide audiences of users. Sepior Threshold KMS provides this functionality in a manner that is off-chain and supports virtually unlimited scale with a threshold model that is inherently highly available, and does not require Hardware Security Modules (HSMs).
Blockchain continues to fuel widespread interest with the promise to break down conventional barriers to collaboration and business innovation. Smart contracts will automate business processes with a permanent record of the rules of the arrangement and a log of each step of the transaction with a ledger that is accessible to a potentially wide range of parties with a stake or a role in the transaction. However, it also introduces some new challenges as most companies will not want all users with access to smart contracts to have visibility to all of the recorded information.
“Blockchain technologies and applications will soon usher in a new era of innovation and multiparty collaboration”, said Yoshitaka Kitao, Representative Director, President & CEO of SBI Holdings. “Facilitating collaboration while preserving privacy will be prerequisite for wide industry adoption. Sepior’s innovation with Threshold KMS directly addresses this industry need with a Threshold Cryptography framework that supports virtually any blockchain technology or smart contract application, which is very compelling.”
Sepior is applying established cryptographic techniques to manage per user visibility and access to sensitive data on permissioned blockchains, but they’re doing so in a revolutionary new manner. Sepior’s use of Threshold Cryptography applies multiparty computation (MPC) to generate and manage encryption key shares which are combined on authorized client devices to allow access to needed fields of information. Threshold KMS automates this service using a fully virtualized and distributed, multi-cloud framework, where the entire key never exists on any key server at any time. Cryptographic key services remain available to applications even if a server or an entire cloud instance goes off-line for any reason, making the system highly secure, highly available, and elastically scalable.
“We’re big believers in the potential for blockchain to revolutionize how businesses transact with one another and end customers”, said Ahmet Tuncay, chief executive officer of Sepior. “Threshold KMS provides a revolutionary new approach to reliably manage privacy and access to critical information in a manner that works off-chain, is compatible with virtually any blockchain, eliminates potential scale constraints of on-chain privacy management alternatives, and with disruptive economics.”
