Everything Distributed and Asynchronous: A Practical System for Key Management Service

Abstract

A key management service (KMS) is vital to modern mission-critical systems. At the core of KMS are the key generation process and the key refresh process. In this paper, we design and implement a purely asynchronous system for completely distributed KMS supporting traditional applications such as threshold cryptosystems and multiparty computation (MPC) as well as emerging blockchains and Web3 applications. In this system, we have built a number of new asynchronous distributed key generation (ADKG) protocols and their corresponding asynchronous distributed key refresh (ADKR) protocols. We have demonstrated that our ADKG and ADKR protocols in the standard model outperform existing ones of the same kind, while our protocols in the random oracle model (ROM) are more efficient than other protocols with small and medium-sized networks.