Cryptosat launched Crypto1 — the first cryptographic root-of-trust in space
We’re at Cryptosat are extremely excited to announce the launch of Crypto1, the first crypto-satellite. Crypto1, launched to a low-earth orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on May 25th, is going to serve as the first cryptographic root-of-trust in space. Cryptosat’s Crypto1 payload took a ride to space alongside SpaceX’s Transorter 5 mission, taking off from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida. You can watch the live stream of the launch here, and our short video-summary of it here.
The idea behind Cryptosat was first outlined by Michalevsky and Winetraub in their 2017 SpaceTEE paper. Physically inaccessible satellites orbiting the earth can be the future of protecting highly sensitive cryptographic building blocks such as obtaining entropy, key-generation, generation of trusted parameters for zero-knowledge and MPC protocols, and many more. Such cryptography has lately been crucial for powering financial ecosystems, as part of the more traditional finance and banking, and mostly within the blockchain and crypto space that are wholly based on cutting-edge cryptography.
Last year, in December 2021, Protocol Labs and Cryptosat announced a collaboration to develop verifiable delays based on physical constraints of communicating with satellites. Earlier this year, in February 2022, Velas blockchain and Cryptosat announced a collaboration around providing a verifiable random beacon to blockchain users. Later on, in March 2022, Cryptosat carried out an experiment aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
About Cryptosat
Cryptosat was founded by Stanford University alumni and serial entrepreneurs bringing together academic and industry experience in Aerospace and Cryptography. Yonatan Winetraub is the co-founder and board member of SpaceIL, an Israeli NGO that built and launched Beresheet, the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to reach the surface of the moon. Yan Michalevsky, in 2018, co-founded Anjuna Security, an enterprise security company in the space of Confidential Computing.
