Advanced Key Management

Advanced Key Management for Bitcoin

Beyond Simple Hardware Wallets

During Bitcoin Wednesday on 5 June, 2019, we’ll hear from CryptoAdvance CTO, Stepan Snigirev who will talk about the standard key management policies used in modern hardware wallets and how we can do better.

He writes:

“If you are an individual storing some amount of bitcoin on a hardware wallet and you are the only person controlling it, a usual hardware wallet may work fine for you. As soon as we start to consider organizations and large amounts, we might want something better.”

In this presentation Stepan will focus on different techniques for improving private key security:

• Multi-Signature Schemes with the Current Elliptic Curve Signature Algorithm;
• What Will Change When We Have Schnorr Signatures;
• The Shamir Secret Sharing Scheme;
• How to Make a Secret Key that No One Knows;
• The Pros and Cons of Different Authentication Methods: PIN Code, Biometrics, Passwords, and Tokens;
• Introduction to Hardware Security;
• Common Attacks;
• Tamper Detection on a Chip and Device Level;
• Current State-of-the-Art Techniques in this Field;
• Privacy in Bitcoin, Including How to Hide the Amounts you Own; and
• CoinJoin and Lightning Network and How to Make Them Work with Hardware Wallets.

Stepan is a quantum physicist with a PhD from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  He also conducted postdoctoral research at Moscow’s Russian Quantum Center and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Munich.  In November 2018 he helped launch the Munich-based startup CryptoAdvance. The company is working on a new secure hardware platform that offers flexible key management and focuses on modern Bitcoin protocol developments.