Sepior ApS, which specialises in threshold cryptography, has announced the interoperability of Sepior ThresholdSig with VMware Blockchain. The ThresholdSig wallet uses multiparty computation (MPC) to decentralise trust, by decentralising the generation and use of key shares across multiple independent parties to sign and approve transactions.
Interoperability between this wallet capability and VMware Blockchain facilitates more secure transactions between enterprise consortium members and other parties. Additionally, it fortifies the decentralized trust paradigm on which VMWare Blockchain was built.
“Our philosophy of decentralizing trust was in complete alignment with VMware’s vision for VMware Blockchain,” said Ahmet Tuncay, chief executive officer of Sepior.
“We’ve also been extremely focused on achieving highly available, low latency services at scale. We believe this interoperability is a strong complement for VMware Blockchain and the full range of blockchain services that will be supported.”
VMware Blockchain
VMware Blockchain is a decentralised trust infrastructure, where VMware Blockchain is a service which provides permissioned blockchain for enterprise consortia. The VMware approach eliminates reliance on a central trusted party by virtualising and distributing trust to multiple parties. This is intrinsically more secure than public blockchains.
By providing a foundation for decentralised trust while delivering enterprise-grade scalability, reliability, security and manageability, the VMware Blockchain integrates into existing VMware tools. This helps protect the network and compute functions that underlie a true enterprise blockchain.
VMware designed VMware Blockchain to address three key areas:
- decentralised trust: The ability to deploy nodes across multiple different cloud environments including on-premises managed nodes.
- robust operations: Supported by VMware Blockchain’s availability as a managed SaaS platform with a ‘single pane of glass management interface’ plus enterprise monitoring and auditing tools.
- developer-friendly offerings: These include tooling for smart contract CI/CD, rich developer guides, API documentation and sample code and an open source foundation (in Project Concord).
VMware Blockchain will be a platform which focuses on encouraging enterprise blockchains into full-scale production. To achieve this, VMware is partnering with Dell Technologies, Deloitte and WWT. They will jointly develop and support VMware Blockchain with support also coming from the IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions.
“Security and decentralized trust have always been central to VMware’s vision for blockchain,” said Michael DiPetrillo, Senior Director of Blockchain at VMware. “We are delighted to work with Sepior to enable core multiparty computation paradigms for smart contract signing, digital asset transfer signing, and key management services by enabling interoperability with Threshold Signatures for VMware Blockchain.”
The Sepior technology
Sepior threshold cryptography supports the VMware decentralised trust model through the use of multiparty computation (MPC) for key management services and digital signing. The ThresholdSig wallet allows multiple independent parties to generate, store, and use their own private key shares. This then provides:
- each party with a discrete approval of smart contracts and digital asset transfers
- no access or control by other parties or any central authority over the shares held by each party.
Digitalisation – like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, (possibly) Libra and others – promise to revolutionise commerce and financial services. While there is not yet any dominant digital asset offerings, Sepior argues that one certainty rules: the need for more effective digital asset security. This is true regardless of whether a transactions runs on a public or a permissioned blockchain.
Conventional single-signature and multi-signature (MultiSig) security schemes have proven to be inadequate. This is where ThresholdSig is relevant. It offers a multiparty transaction security scheme based on threshold cryptography which redefines how to secure digital assets, and the wallets which account for them.
Sepior believes its ThresholdSig is the industry’s first multiparty approval digital signature technology to use threshold cryptography with multiparty computation (MPC) in order to secure digital asset transactions. By securing the transactions, which move assets from one wallet to another, ThresholdSig secures the wallet and all associated digital assets with security, privacy and on-chain efficiency. These minimise costs and transaction latency.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
VMware’s Project Dimension enables customers to consume infrastructure which physically resides in data centres, branch or edge sites through a cloud-managed ‘as-a-Service’ approach. By taking cloud-managed IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) and delivering it as required, Project Dimension opens up the ability to power edge, data centre, and hybrid cloud use cases. Incorporating VMware Blockchain is logical.
Now, Sepior builds upon this with its ThresholdSig. Though Sepior’s objectives are different to those of VMware, they complement.
This has potential significance if it means that blockchain-aspirants can turn to dependable and proven infrastructure suppliers for their blockchain initiatives. For enterprise IT the advantages will be great – if the VMware Blockchain and Sepior ThresholdSig approach is usable. That remains unclear and a question to resolve.
