NuCypher brings privacy and security to the public blockchain

(For a deeper dive, check out our technical white paper and business primer).

Transport Layer Security (TLS, previously SSL) is one of the cornerstones of the Internet today. Without TLS, no safe e-commerce would be possible and we wouldn’t be able to trust websites with our private data. Imagine living in a house made of glass - that’s how your digital life would be seen by hackers if TLS didn’t exist.

Today, the internet is being rebuilt. Decentralized applications, running on the blockchain and controlled by no central authority are completely reshaping the internet. Marketplaces are being decentralized (OpenBazaar). File storage is being decentralized by IPFS, Storj, and Sia. Decentralized, peer-to-peer video streaming like Popcorn Time is competitive to Netflix. And there are a plethora of decentralized email, chat, and messaging decentralized applications that are already here or in the works. All these applications, when decentralized, will benefit from resiliency and censorship resistance.

However, realizing this promise of a decentralized future requires just as much investment in the underlying infrastructure (storage, processing, and security of data) as in the applications that run on top of it. And thanks to the blockchain, all of this infrastructure will be tokenized and owned by its community of users rather than a single company.

This infrastructure will be tokenized and owned by its community of users rather than a single company.

In a decentralized world, traditional encryption and access control won’t be enough. Today, internet security is architected around a trusted central server and multiple clients connecting to it. The server encrypts everything it sends to the clients with session keys and enforces access controls. But in a decentralized world, there is no central server you can trust!

Privacy, and the storing, sharing, and manipulating of private data in public consensus networks like Ethereum has proven a significant challenge.

NuCypher is the TLS/SSL of the decentralized internet

We’ve architected and designed the NuCypher Network to solve this problem. Using proxy re-encryption, NuCypher provides decentralized key management, secrets management, and cryptographic access control.

We’re excited to release a major update to our technical white paper (PDF, GitHub). We’re also releasing an early version of the NuCypher Primer, which describes why the network exists, how proxy re-encryption works, the network’s token economics, and introduces the team behind the project.

Look for news and announcements in the weeks to come as we continue to build the security and privacy layer for decentralized applications.

In the meantime, join us in Slack or subscribe to our mailing list. We’re excited to see what you build and we’ll see you there!