Arcula: A Secure Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet for Multi-asset Blockchains

06/13/2019

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by   Adriano Di Luzio, et al.

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This work presents Arcula, a new design for hierarchical deterministic wallets that significantly improves the state of the art. Arcula is built on top of provably secure cryptographic primitives. It generates all its cryptographic secrets from a user-provided seed and enables the derivation of new signing public keys without requiring any secret information. Unlike other wallets, it achieves all these properties while being secure against privilege escalation. We prove that an attacker compromising an arbitrary number of users within an Arcula wallet cannot escalate his privileges and compromise users higher in the access hierarchy. Our design works out-of-the-box with any blockchain that enables the verification of signatures on arbitrary messages. We evaluate its usage in a real-world scenario on the Bitcoin Cash network.