The Cerberus Protocol: Appendix

The motherlode of background information on the Cerberus bitcoin storage protocol

By Neil Woodfine

After a long hiatus, we’ve finally completed a first draft of the Cerberus Protocol’s Appendix.

Backloading the Background

The Cerberus Protocol is painstakingly designed to be as lightweight as possible. For example, we only provide optional choices when absolutely necessary (don’t make them think!) and include as little explainer text as is required for the secure execution of the protocol.

However, this may hide a great deal of work and energy that has gone into designing Cerberus. The lack of explainer also makes it difficult for reviewers to understand the reasoning behind the decisions we have made.

The Appendix is our answer to this, providing as much background information as possible on:

1. The motivations behind the Cerberus Protocol;
2. Design notes on each individual step of the instructions.

What’s Included

1. Cerberus Background: The team behind Cerberus and the project’s origins.
2. Basic Bitcoin Security Principles: Fundamental principles behind bitcoin storage security, how personal storage differs from organisational storage, and the importance of self-storage.
3. The Cerberus Approach: An overview of how Cerberus deals with organisational storage.
4. Frequently Asked Questions: Some answers to the common questions we’ve been getting since launching the protocol.
5. Protocol Design & Risks: A companion to each of Cerberus’s chapters 1–8, providing notes on design decisions and outstanding risks.

For Reference, Not Execution

The Cerberus Appendix is where we really let our hair down and take our time to explain our thinking. It is very long and wordy. As such, it is important to stress that the Appendix is not intended to be an essential read for the execution of the protocol—following chapters 1 to 8 step-by-step should be enough for an inexperienced team to create a secure, self-storage bitcoin wallet and start making transactions.

The Appendix is designed strictly to act as a reference both for:

1. The organisations deploying Cerberus storage that are curious about why they are performing certain steps;
2. Reviewers that want to better understand a design decision before recommending a change (always extremely welcome!).

Of course, we do still hope that some people read the whole thing! The Cerberus Appendix may currently be the most comprehensive summary of organisational bitcoin multisig storage ever produced. Anyone that takes the time to go through it should gain a much greater understanding of organisational bitcoin storage security.

Bitcoin Gets Stronger With Your Review

Right now, every organisation out there is making it up as they go along for their bitcoin storage. Some of them are very good at security, but most are not. A worryingly large proportion are resorting to custodians because it’s easy and gives them someone else to blame when something goes wrong.

This situation presents a major systemic risk to the whole bitcoin industry. Cerberus is designed to be a step toward increasing the number of organisations that choose bitcoin self-storage and to do it right.

The more review we get from smart bitcoiners out there, the more secure Cerberus will be, and the more businesses we’ll be able to bring on board. From typo corrections to whole section rewrites, let us know by submitting an issue on the Cerberus GitHub, or email us at storage@clavestone.io.

Just bear in mind that we are doing our best to keep the protocol lean, so will have to make subjective judgements on maintaining a balance between usability and convenience.

Blog Posts Coming Up

To help promote the Cerberus Protocol we’ll be breaking out some of the sections from the Appendix to post individually as blog posts. Our expectation is some people may prefer to read the content in bite-sized chunks in the blog format. Of course, if you’re more of a binge reader, you can complete it all in one go over at the official Cerberus website.

We want your feedback! Drop us some comments on Medium, send us an email to storage@clavestone.io, or submit an issue on GitHub.

If you like the look of the Cerberus Protocol and would like updates when we release a new section, follow our Medium account!

And of course, don’t forget to applaud and share our article!