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Thetacrypt: A Distributed Service for Threshold Cryptography

Mariarosaria Barbaraci, Noah Schmid, Orestis Alpos, Michael Senn, Christian Cachin

TL;DR

Thetacrypt proposes a modular, language-agnostic framework that treats threshold cryptography as a pluggable service, decoupling cryptographic schemes from the underlying network. It delivers a three-layer architecture (service, core, network) with a Threshold Round Interface to support multi-round protocols and a flexible scheme library for ciphers, signatures, and randomness. The paper demonstrates how this unified platform enables fair benchmarking and integration with diverse distributed protocols, while providing practical insights into the performance trade-offs between local computation and network latency under varying deployments. The proposed framework aligns with standardization efforts and offers an open-source reference implementation for evaluating threshold-cryptographic schemes in realistic distributed environments.

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.

Thetacrypt: A Distributed Service for Threshold Cryptography

TL;DR

Thetacrypt proposes a modular, language-agnostic framework that treats threshold cryptography as a pluggable service, decoupling cryptographic schemes from the underlying network. It delivers a three-layer architecture (service, core, network) with a Threshold Round Interface to support multi-round protocols and a flexible scheme library for ciphers, signatures, and randomness. The paper demonstrates how this unified platform enables fair benchmarking and integration with diverse distributed protocols, while providing practical insights into the performance trade-offs between local computation and network latency under varying deployments. The proposed framework aligns with standardization efforts and offers an open-source reference implementation for evaluating threshold-cryptographic schemes in realistic distributed environments.

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.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 32 sections, 2 equations, 5 figures, 4 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background and motivation
  3. Fault-tolerant distributed systems
  4. Threshold cryptography
  5. Threshold cryptosystem
  6. Threshold signature
  7. Distributed randomness
  8. Motivation
  9. Practical applications
  10. Conceptual unification
  11. Thetacrypt
  12. Problem statement
  13. Model
  14. Architecture
  15. Service Layer
  16. ...and 17 more sections

Figures (5)

  • Figure 1: Integration of the Thetacrypt module ($\Theta$) in a blockchain network, where each network node runs a five-layer blockchain stack.
  • Figure 2: The Thetacrypt architecture consists of three layers. Cryptographic operations are provided by the schemes module and they are connected to the network through the protocols and orchestration modules.
  • Figure 3: The orchestration module and its components
  • Figure 4: Server-side Throughput-Latency graphs
  • Figure 5: Five-minute experiments at knee capacity.