Distributed Privacy Guard - Summary

This group is not part of the GNU Project.

The Distributed Privacy Guard implements Distributed Key Generation (DKG) and Threshold Cryptography for OpenPGP. The generated public keys are compatible with the standard and thus can be used by any RFC4880-compliant application (e.g. GnuPG). The main purposes of this software are

• distributing power among multiple parties,
• eliminating single points of failure, and
• increasing the difficulty of side-channel attacks on private key material.

Due to the interactiveness of the protocols a lot of messages between participating parties have to be exchanged in a secure way. We employ GNUnet, and in particular its mesh routed CADET service, to establish private and broadcast channels for this message exchange. A reliable broadcast protocol from LibTMCG is used as mechanism to achieve some validity, consistency, and totality in a most likely asynchronous communication environment. However, there are still some limitations due to the predefined timeout values. Such problems may be recognized by looking for timeout error messages on STDERR.

Please note that for building dkg-generate, dkg-sign, dkg-keysign, dkg-revoke, dkg-refresh, dkg-timestamp, and the interactive version of dkg-decrypt with GNUnet support the development files for a very recent GNUnet version (at least v0.11.x, which is when writing these lines still not yet released) must be present at configure-time resp. compile-time of DKGPG. However, as alternative to GNUnet a simple TCP/IP based service for message exchange is included. With torsocks and port-forwarding of a hidden service this allows running the interactive programs over the well-known Tor network.

The package depends on following free software libraries:

• LibTMCG - providing the advanced cryptographic protocols for DKG and Threshold Cryptography,
• GNU Crypto Library (libgcrypt) - providing basic cryptographic primitives (e.g. randomness, message digests, and symmetric ciphers),
• GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library (libgmp) - providing basic mathematical operations on large integers,
• zlib Compression Library (libz) - providing functions to decompress ZIP/GZIP data, and
• optional Library for data compression (libbzip2) - providing functions to decompress BZIP2 data.

Registration Date: Sun 24 Sep 2017 12:45:44 PM UTC
License: GNU General Public License v2 or later
Development Status: 4 - Beta