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Umbral: a cryptosystem for private data sharing in public consensus networks (nucypher.com)
15 points by mwilkison on March 21, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments


Hey HN friends. I too have worked on (and will probably keep working on) this project. It's pretty wild! There are two things about it that I think you'll like:

1) (the obvious) - it allows a user to share a secret with a third party (the "proxy") who, without being able to read it, can then share it with another person. For the purposes of narrating this, we expand "Alice - Bob" to "Alice - Ursula - Bob". Kinda cool.

2) We have introduced a couple of interesting turns of phrase. For example, we "encapsulate" a key (a very common practice), but in so doing, we say that the key in inside a "Capsule". I've never seen this object called a Capsule before, but it makes a good deal of sense - Bob brings a Capsule to Ursula and asks for her help "opening" (ie, decapsulating) it.

I think that we've made some interesting if modest motions forward in the modeling and naming that is required for distributed proxy re-encryption, and I'm curious to know if y'all think so too.


The foundation for a great crypto project. Few are making products that push the development of the ecosystem. Excited for the launch on testnet.


Hey, folks! I'm a cryptographic engineer at NuCypher and this is a pretty big release for us. I'm happy to answer any questions about this!




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