There’s A New Crypto Library In Town — And This One Focuses on Privacy: Kryptology
We need to build a new Internet. One that is build on mathematics and certainty, rather than the patchy version we have now. For this we need a layer of cryptography at the lowest level, and build software interfaces on top of this. Along with this we now have cryptographic methods which can now provide a foundation of trust, and which preserve privacy. And so the old libraries of OpenSSL are being squeezed out in favour of the new ones which are built on a solid foundation.
The latest of these new “privacy-aware” libraries is Kryptology, and created by Coinbase. This library provides the APIs that developers need, in order to apply to areas of blockchain development. This library include BLS (Boneh-Lynn-Shacham (BLS) signatures, Zero-knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) and Shamir Secret Shares (SSS). With BLS we can digitally sign for data, but also preserve its privacy. Applications of this include group signatures, where multiple entities can merge their signing keys together and provide a single signature for a transaction. With SSS, we can split encryption keys up into shares, and then distribute them across a network. When required, we can call these shares back to reconstruct the key.
The focus for Coinbase seems to be the application of privacy coins, and where no tracking can be…
