It's an unfortunate fact for the crypto industry that one of its biggest claims to fame is its massive security breaches, including the hack last month that Ethereum. As part of an ongoing bid by leading industry players to improve this situation, Coinbase on Thursday announced it was sharing a package of its cutting edge security technology.
In a blog post, Chief Security Officer Philip Martin said Coinbase has taken its library of code for so-called Multi-Party Computation (MPC), and made it publicly available on GitHub, including its competitors.
The company took this measure in part because, currently, there is a lack of standards when it comes to security tools in the crypto industry, Martin told Fortune. While there is an ISO-like certification regime for best practices in crypto security, it does not encompass or provide advanced technical measures. According to Martin, this means that every company is using its version of a padlock, many of them incredibly flimsy, and that there is no equivalent of a Master Lock (or other famous brand) in the crypto industry.
Coinbase's contribution on Thursday, then, amounts to taking what it regards as the very best lock it can build and share it with the industry. As for how it works, Martin described it this way in the Coinbase blog post:
"Imagine a safe that requires multiple combination codes to unlock. Each person in a group knows only their part of the combination, and they never share their piece with anyone else. To open the safe, everyone inputs their respective code simultaneously. The safe unlocks without any individual ever knowing the complete combination."
In sharing its MPC code, Coinbase is also offering bug bounties—a reward system that pays cash rewards to anyone who finds vulnerabilities in the code. (This is a common practice among sophisticated tech and crypto communities).
The specific security issues that Coinbase's MPC code seeks to address are: Secure methods for protecting crypto keys; code that enables multiple parties to sign transactions securely; technical documentation and examples to help developers implement MPC correctly.
Its unclear how many crypto firms will choose to use Coinbase's donated security but even modest adoption could thwart some of the hacks that remain endemic to crypto.
