Anchorage Unveils Plan to Protect Against Quantum Threats
Regulated crypto bank Anchorage Digital has presented a strategy for preparing institutional assets for the post-quantum era, including implementing hybrid protection for internal TLS connections. The bank highlights that for cryptocurrencies, the main quantum risk lies in digital signatures, as Shor's algorithm could theoretically derive a private key from a public one.
To mitigate this, Anchorage uses Bitcoin addresses based on a hash of the public key, which keeps the key hidden until a transaction is sent, and practices minimal address reuse. Internally, the company has deployed post-quantum key encapsulation for employee devices on ChromeOS and is implementing post-quantum cryptography within its hardware security modules (HSMs).
A key proposal is the "Post-Quantum Turnstile" mechanism, which uses STARK zero-knowledge proofs to allow users to migrate signing rights to a post-quantum key without exposing their old private or public key. This could help secure an estimated two-thirds of circulating coins that might otherwise become inaccessible if the network phases out classical signatures.
Furthermore, Anchorage open-sourced its Rust implementation of the SQIsign digital signature scheme, which it claims offers signatures about seven times smaller than the Falcon algorithm. This comes amid warnings that around 6 million BTC in addresses with exposed public keys could be vulnerable to future quantum attacks.
cryptonews.ruHace 40 min(s)
