Minimizing Trust in Hardware Wallets with Two Factor Signatures

Antonio Marcedone*, Rafael Pass, Abhi Shelat

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

We introduce the notion of two-factor signatures (2FS), a generalization of a two-out-of-two threshold signature scheme in which one of the parties is a hardware token which can store a high-entropy secret, and the other party is a human who knows a low-entropy password. The security (unforgeability) property of 2FS requires that an external adversary corrupting either party (the token or the computer the human is using) cannot forge a signature. This primitive is useful in contexts like hardware cryptocurrency wallets in which a signature conveys the authorization of a transaction. By the above security property, a hardware wallet implementing a two-factor signature scheme is secure against attacks mounted by a malicious hardware vendor; in contrast, all currently used wallet systems break under such an attack (and as such are not secure under our definition). We construct efficient provably-secure 2FS schemes which produce either Schnorr signature (assuming the DLOG assumption), or EC-DSA signatures (assuming security of EC-DSA and the CDH assumption) in the Random Oracle Model, and evaluate the performance of implementations of them. Our EC-DSA based 2FS scheme can directly replace currently used hardware wallets for Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies to enable security against malicious hardware vendors.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFinancial Cryptography and Data Security - 23rd International Conference, FC 2019, Revised Selected Papers
EditorsIan Goldberg, Tyler Moore
PublisherSpringer
Pages407-425
Number of pages19
ISBN (Print)9783030321000
DOIs
StatePublished - 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event23rd International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, FC 2019 - St. Kitts, Saint Kitts and Nevis
Duration: 18 Feb 201922 Feb 2019

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume11598 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference23rd International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, FC 2019
Country/TerritorySaint Kitts and Nevis
CitySt. Kitts
Period18/02/1922/02/19

Funding

FundersFunder number
National Science FoundationCNS-1704788, CNS-1561209, CNS-1217821
Air Force Office of Scientific ResearchFA9550-15-1-0262, FA9550-18-1-0267
Microsoft
Google1646671, 1664445

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