Born out of a hackathon at TABCONF 2024, Frostr might have simply solved Nostr’s most pernicious situation: the lack to reset your password in case your personal key will get compromised.
Began in October of 2024, Frostr simply introduced the alpha launch of Igloo and Frost2x, a desktop and accompanying browser extension key signers for the Nostr ecosystem.
The challenge was based by Topher (cmdruid) who made his identify as a Bitcoin engineer for growing Tapscript — a well-liked library for managing Taproot, Schnorr signatures, and Bitcoin transactions — and Austin (bitcoinplebdev) a Lightning developer for Voltage and founding father of PlebDevs, a Lightning-powered developer schooling platform with over 500 enrolled college students.
Whereas resetting a password could seem innocuous or like a easy UI characteristic, it’s not that straightforward. Let me take you on a journey of the complexity of the difficulty it solves and the magnitude of what’s at stake if we fail to resolve this apparently easy drawback.
The Social Media Revolution
Social media has modified the world. And but, we discover ourselves in a wierd place with our digital identities. Who we’re on-line and the way we assert possession of our on-line profiles usually is determined by trusted third events like Fb which are too massive to care about any particular person buyer and essentially have the ability to vary the principles at any time, and even cancel your account altogether.
The deplatforming of controversial influencers and even politicians lately function examples of how this centralized energy could be wielded. Maybe the best-known illustration of that is the removing of U.S. President Donald Trump from each Fb and Twitter shortly after the January 6 riots on the U.S. capitol, simply days earlier than the top of his first time period.
Nonetheless, a lot of the world continues to function on this digital neo-feudalism construction. It appears there’s a basic drawback with the “decentralization” of id that’s but to be solved.
Trendy-Day Financial institution Theft
Identification methods are a vital layer of society. Whether or not you’re a citizen of Rome 2,000 years in the past or of the USA at present, doorways open and shut primarily based on what ID you maintain. At the moment’s methods, as superior as they could appear, depend on a pre-digital conception of id and safety: They rely on authenticating your face.
The ID card itself, whether or not your driver’s license or passport, helps authorities staff, financial institution tellers and bar bouncers all around the world do a quite simple factor: Resolve in case you seem like the particular person on the official card, after which kind out in case you are allowed entry or not.
However the world is altering quick. Neither the obscurity of your bodily look nor the key nature of your social safety quantity (SSN) are what they have been within the pre-internet world: Many individuals have revealed their full names and footage to Fb, and a sequence of hacks have leaked tons of SSN knowledge to the darkish internet. (For instance, the Equifax Information Breach in 2017, which affected 147.9 million People, or the Nationwide Public Information Breach of 2024 with over 200 million People compromised.)
Within the analog, pre-internet days, when a robber burst via the doorways of their native financial institution, they might achieve this to take the money, gold and tradable valuables saved within the vaults.
However that’s now not how issues work. Within the digital age, cash is now not money. Fiat funds are sometimes reversible, so in case you hack right into a financial institution and transfer cash to your account in some way, not solely can that be reversed, however you simply uncovered a hyperlink to your id.
At the moment, the web equal of a robber just isn’t seeking to steal money, gold or different valuables, however slightly, private id knowledge.
That knowledge can, in flip, be used to defraud those self same banks, in addition to companies of all sizes.
Certainly, id fraud prices greater than all different types of theft mixed, totaling over $56 billion in 2020.
Not solely have many of those centralized platforms had their knowledge vaults hacked and their contents bought on the darkish internet for pennies on the greenback, however AI is bettering shortly and has already handed the Turing check of picture technology. We’re at some extent the place rogue actors can create faux selfies holding faux IDs with leaked person knowledge and idiot the gatekeepers to your digital wealth.
This menace is more likely to incentivize change, and you may see the brand new efforts by tech corporations and authorities establishments to improve id methods. Take California’s cell driver’s license app for example, mDL — developed in partnership with each Google and Apple — is initially built-in with airports for id verification. However the app additionally invitations builders to combine it as a type of authentication for web sites basically. ID.me takes the same method and is already totally built-in with the IRS, boasting 136 million members.
Many of those apps require face or fingerprint authentication, and ask for more and more advanced KYC selfies from their customers who should maintain up IDs and up to date newspapers to be authenticated.
Regardless of the apparent weak point of utilizing your face to authenticate your id within the age of Fb, tech giants proceed to depend on biometric knowledge, combining it with mass surveillance instruments seen within the social credit score rating methods being constructed up in China.
To have an opportunity at curbing what looks as if destiny within the digital age, earlier than it involves the West, we want an id authentication system that’s each safe and agnostic to biometric knowledge. We’d like an id system that doesn’t depend on our face.
Enter Nostr, a Bitcoin-Period Identification and Social Media Protocol
Born out of the Bitcoin developer ecosystem, Nostr has shortly grown right into a social media community in its personal proper.
An abbreviation of “Notes and Different Stuff Transmitted by Relays” — a little bit of a mouthful — Nostr empowers customers to authenticate themselves into social media pseudonyms (nyms) and signal their posts with a Bitcoin-style personal key. As a self-custody system that essentially democratizes the web away from its present construction, it opens up an entire new set of potentialities for social media.
Proponents of Nostr argue that customers can lastly personal their very own knowledge and now not must rely on the charity or benevolence of the Silicon Valley giants after they determine to maneuver platforms or decide the unsuitable political get together.
Nostr works through a distributed client-server community topology, which lets you entry content material throughout numerous servers known as relays. If one goes down or begins censoring customers unfairly, chances are high there’s one other window into the Nostr content material feed that can grant you entry and mean you can publish your ideas.
The dream of Nostr is to unlock a brand new technology of social media know-how that doesn’t flip customers into merchandise by mining their knowledge, that doesn’t drive biometric authentication, compromising their privateness, and that permits builders to construct in an open community whose cryptography and specs are already open supply and which is natively built-in with Bitcoin, the web’s cash.
Celebrities and customers who want to shield their Nostr manufacturers from faux accounts making an attempt to impersonate them can observe a typical much like the one developed by Keybase, which requested customers to publicly attest to their a keybase id with their different social media accounts, consolidating markers of repute into one cryptographically managed id. Although that’s not at present a apply in Nostr, it’s a drawback moderately properly solved in a decentralized method by Keybase.
Nevertheless, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Pushing id possession to the sides comes with an entire new set of issues that up till now have not likely been solved and which have personally held me again from investing in increase my model on Nostr.
No Password Resets
There’s at present no actual strategy to reset your password for a Nostr nym or id. Constructed on a easy public key pair system, in case your personal key will get hacked or leaked, your id is actually now underneath the management of whoever acquired it. (You each have the key, so nobody has unique management of it.)
It is a large situation. Though the examples of such hacks will not be too frequent, they’re a big deterrent for manufacturers which may contemplate placing critical capital into constructing on this new social community protocol.
This explicit threat is made worse by the supposed design of Nostr, which invitations many various interfaces to be created to entry content material of varied varieties with the identical person identities and implies that customers give their personal keys to a number of purchasers, thus multiplying the danger of compromise.
One layer of protection that has been constructed up and grow to be widespread in consequence is the concept of an exterior signer, usually a browser extension like Alby that helps handle your personal key as a form of password supervisor, facilitating signing of content material for you on the assorted Nostr platforms.
Whereas this works properly sufficient at present it doesn’t clear up the basic drawback. One mistake and the nym is successfully compromised, the worth of that built-up model or repute not simply harmed however doubtlessly exploitable by scammers sporting your id to harass your mates or clients.
That is much like the quite common impersonation scams on Fb, Instagram and Twitter, which clone your profile and DM your recognized associates with phishing schemes, however even worse. In Nostr such an assault can be performed with your id — not a faux profile — considerably harming confidence within the authenticity of all content material for many who are conscious of the difficulty.
The answer ought to be easy: simply create a password reset characteristic. Proper?
Nicely, it seems some very inventive engineering is required right here, as a result of password resets are mainly solely potential by giving up your management over your id to a 3rd get together who can replace a central database and provide you with a brand new key set.
Till now, that’s. Let’s dive into Frostr.
Frost a Breakthrough in Sovereign Key Administration
Latest breakthroughs in cryptography have opened new doorways for self custody within the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency business. One particular innovation that’s shortly getting into the market is Frost, a Schnorr-based key administration and key rotation scheme that achieves related performance as Bitcoin multi-signature addresses and transactions, however with out the on-chain transactions prices or privateness trade-offs.
Schnorr is a type of cryptography invented within the Nineteen Nineties. Just a few years after the expiration of its European and U.S. patents, Schnorr began being mentioned as a potential future improve to Bitcoin, and was in the end launched within the Taproot gentle fork improve of 2020.
That very same 12 months Chelsea Komlo and Ian Goldberg revealed “FROST: Versatile Spherical-Optimized Schnorr Threshold Signatures”, a technical spec that set the inspiration for its use within the Lightning Community infrastructure in addition to new multi-signature schemes for self custody often called FROST.
Whereas the cryptography is advanced and explaining it past the scope of this text, it resembles schemes like Shamir’s secret sharing. The cryptographic rules concerned enable customers to create a 24-word seed with Trezor’s {hardware} pockets, break up up into three shares of 12 phrases every. Any two shares mixed could be assembled into the grasp personal key of the pockets, whereas anyone share alone is inadequate to compromise or get better entry to the account.
Right here’s a two-minute video rationalization of FROST by Andrew Poelstra, Head of Analysis at Blockstream:
This similar precept is utilized in FROST, a scheme which is designed to allow multi-party, multi-signature wallets, like these utilized by exchanges, doubtlessly changing multi-signature Bitcoin scripts, benefiting customers with extra privateness and decrease prices.
Frostr extends FROST by integrating it with Nostr’s relay protocol — therefore the added “r” within the identify. It additionally adapts the know-how to single-user wallets, slightly than industrial-grade, multi-user schemes, permitting easier setups and unlocking key rotation (password resets) for particular person customers with single key pairs, like these utilized in Nostr.
Frostr allows three new options specifically:
- Threshold key signing, in order that if one key will get compromised, it may be rotated out, and a contemporary set of sub keys are generated, which generate the Nostr personal keypair. No want to vary your Nostr private and non-private keys (nsec). Much like — for instance — a 2-of-3 multisignature Bitcoin pockets, the place if one secret’s misplaced or compromised, the opposite two can be utilized to maneuver the cash to a brand new steady construction, and regain management of three contemporary keys, however off-chain. It’s a magical factor.
- No want for application-layer options to Nostr key rotation, solely the important thing signers like Alby must combine Frostr; Nostr apps like Primal or Damus wouldn’t even know that Frostr is getting used for key rotation by its customers.
- Customers who have already got Nostr accounts, whose nsecs haven’t been compromised, don’t must migrate to new keypairs and identities however merely take away their nsecs from present key signers and begin utilizing Frostr as a safer key administration system as an alternative.
The end result? A significant piece of the decentralized social media puzzle is unlocked: Trustless identities with password resets that don’t rely on centralized gatekeepers for authentication.
The results of this innovation, if fruitful, are basic. The Nostr ecosystem can be smart to check out Frostr; it’d simply be sufficient of a safety and UI enchancment that an entire new technology of non-biometric, trustless digital identities, and sovereign knowledge possession use circumstances are unlocked for the Bitcoin age.
For a deeper dive into Frostr, take a look at their web site at Frostr.org or take a look at this podcast I recorded with Topher and Austin on the subject.
https://creators.spotify.com/pod/present/bitcoin-magazine-po/episodes/FROSTR-Defined-A-Gamechanger-for-NOSTR-Identification-Administration–The-Juan-Galt-Present-e30op20
