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We say something like this in pretty much every report, but we want to reiterate that we are always interested in getting in touch with others who want to use cryptography, and particularly so for people that want to use non-standardized crypto like threshold signatures or zero knowledge proofs.  If this describes you, please feel free to get in touch with us.

Releases

We haven't made a new release this quarter (last one was v0released 0.3.4 on Jul 7, 2020 0.3.5 Aug 19, 2020 this quarter, and bbs 0.4.0 , on May 18)on Jul 7, 2020.  Internally, we are on v0.4.2 (we didn't release a v0.4.1) but will probably cut a new release in the not too distant future.3.6.

The new releases include

  • BBS+ work with wasm
  • Shamir secret sharing
  • BLS signature integration with Signer interface

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

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  • We added WASM support for BBS+ signatures as we indicated in our plans in the last report.  The BBS+ signature code is probably our most popular feature, as a number of people outside Hyperledger seem to be using this.
  • Upgraded all of our external dependencies on crypto primitives to the latest versions and ensured compatibility.
  • Implemented our own version of Shamir secret sharing.  Exsiting Existing versions don't have the flexibility that we need in Ursa.  For those unaware, Shamir secret sharing (and some other tricks) are widely used across group-based threshold cryptography.  We have demand for threshold crypto implementations, so this is something that we are currently working towards.
  • Perhaps most importantly, we agreed to an RFC that details the project structure for the zero knowledge proofs.  This will guide Ursa going forward.
  • We did not make much progress on trusted hardware this quarter, unfortunately.

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  • Threshold cryptography:  we would like to have threshold signatures and other threshold crypto primitives.  We are planning on working towards building these.
    • tBLS
    • Feldman VSS
    • Pedersen VSS
  • Accumulator work
    • RSA
    • ECC
  • Post-quantum cryptography:  now that the NIST competition is in the final round, we feel like it is time to start providing options for post-quantum crypto primitives in Ursa.  Luckily, many of the teams behind these new key exchange protocols and signature schemes have written their code in Rust, so hopefully integration should be straightforward.  This will probably necessitate some work on our configuration options for the "base" Ursa primitives.
  • Hyperledger Cactus is potentially interested in using Ursa.  This will require effort from both sides, but we may aim to work on our node.js wrappers to help them.

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We have received more academic interest in Ursa recently, which has been a very positive development.  In particular, we had a meeting with Prof. Anna Lysyanskaya, an IACR fellow and famous cryptographer, to discuss our CL signatures and open problems regarding anonymous credentials.  We can hopefully get more academic interest in Ursa and use this to stay on the cutting edge of safe cryptography. 

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