Silence Laboratories Partners with Waku to add Decentralised Communication to MPC-TSS SDKs
November 2, 2023 — Silence Laboratories, a cryptography powerhouse which offers an array of libraries for multi-party computation (MPC), is thrilled to announce its partnership with Waku. Waku has been co-developing with Silence Laboratories, integrating its censorship-resistant, disintermediated communications protocols to facilitate Distributed Key Generation and signing (using the Threshold Signature-based Silent Shard library of Silence Laboratories) without reliance on a central server during the MPC-TSS interactions.
This is part of a series of blogs wherein we will shed light on how to use decentralised comunication with our MPC-TSS SDKs, understand the current constraints due to centralised communication, and discuss problems that we solve.
The integration now enables a fully decentralised MPC Threshold Signature Scheme (TSS) for partners. In practice, MPC-TSS requires participating parties to exchange multiple rounds of messages and collaborate on their secrets without exposing them to one another. Frequently, this exchange occurs via centralised servers/relays, such as Firebase, Amazon, or SQS. Although convenient, this centralised approach raises privacy and business continuity concerns and introduces a trusted central authority, i.e., a single point of control or DOS vector.
Waku — a family of censorship-resistant web3 communications protocols is built to enable private, generalised messaging. Waku is peer-to-peer, making it permissionless, continuous, and resistant to censorship, and it leverages cutting-edge zero-knowledge-proof systems to hide messages and associated metadata.
The integration of Waku brings these qualities, which are understandably desirable for MPC, to Silence Laboratories’ libraries, such as the Silent Shard key and access management SDK and libraries. An upcoming release will feature the integration and benefit any multiparty setup involving user devices.
Examples include:
A few of our partners have added TSS to their browser wallets using the capabilities of a {2,2} MPC-TSS. The key shards are shared between the browser wallet and a phone authenticator application using Silent Shard for the browser extension. Using this integration, Waku adds an alternative to Firebase as the communication layer, mitigating risks arising from centralised infrastructure.
“While MPC-TSS protocols are very chatty and require rounds of communications, adding peer-peer communication like Waku within our SDKs would help in faster realization of truly distributed self-custody. We are excited to work closely with developers of digital asset solutions (various form factors of wallets) and support them in building resilient key-management infrastructure,” says Dr Jay Prakash, CEO of Silence Laboratories.
Mutually beneficial, the collaboration also enables Waku to strengthen and tailor its JavaScript SDKs’ developer experience to varied applications, as Franck Royer, Waku’s development lead, explained:
“This collaboration has allowed us to enhance our JavaScript SDK to align it seamlessly with the UX requirements for an MPC setup, which often involves multiple message round trips. The engineering team at Silence Laboratories has been instrumental in this endeavour, providing valuable insights and feedback on our SDK.”
The integration of the Waku SDK and preliminary benchmarking against earlier implementations of centralised communication infrastructure have indicated promising results regarding the time taken for key generation and signature. Silence Laboratories is publishing a series of detailed blog posts about the usage of the feature in its SDKs, along with the benchmarking numbers.
We welcome you to join in the discussion, collaborate and build together. Please write to us on email or by booking a slot to discuss things through our Calendly here.
About Silence Laboratories:
Silence Laboratories is a deep-tech, authentication-infrastructure provider that offers developer-focused SDKs and libraries for protocols, wallets, and projects that can be used to embed/build distributed, zero-trust authentication and authorisation products alike. We aim to provide the de facto MPC product suite for other builders. For ease of integration, we are application, protocol, and stack agnostic.
About Waku
Waku is a family of robust and censorship-resistant communication protocols enabling privacy-focused messaging for web3 applications. Its modular design makes it suitable for various environments, including browsers and mobile devices, allowing developers to select which protocols to integrate according to their use case and users’ hardware capabilities. Waku protocols enable human-to-human, machine-to-machine, and combinations of the two while ensuring that messaging cannot be censored or surveilled, thus empowering users with complete control over their data.
