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Thetacrypt: A Distributed Service for Threshold Cryptography

2025/02/05 by Mariarosaria Barbaraci, Barbaraci, Mariarosaria, Noah Schmid +7
Computer Science · #Chaos-based Image/Signal Encryption #Cryptography and Data Security #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2502.03247

openalex publication_date 2025/02/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Threshold cryptography is a powerful and well-known technique with many applications to systems relying on distributed trust. It has recently emerged also as a solution to challenges in blockchain: frontrunning prevention, managing wallet keys, and generating randomness. This work presents Thetacrypt, a versatile library for integrating many threshold schemes into one codebase. It offers a way to easily build distributed systems using threshold cryptography and is agnostic to their implementation language. The architecture of Thetacrypt supports diverse protocols uniformly. The library currently includes six cryptographic schemes that span ciphers, signatures, and randomness generation. The library additionally contains a flexible adapter to an underlying networking layer that provides peer-to-peer communication and a total-order broadcast channel; the latter can be implemented by distributed ledgers, for instance. Thetacrypt serves as a controlled testbed for evaluating the performance of multiple threshold-cryptographic schemes under consistent conditions, showing how the traditional micro benchmarking approach neglects the distributed nature of the protocols and its relevance when considering system performance.

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