Just landed in this community and, wow, the tech around ICP is something else, echt impressive. As I’m diving into all the innovations the protocol’s got to offer, chainkey tech caught my eye first. Curious if anyone here could shed some light on it for me.
I’m especially eager to get the lowdown on what makes the chain key approach so unique. I mean, we’ve had ways to handle verifiable key-share redistribution since the late '90s, early '00s, right? So, what’s the deal with chain key that sets it apart from the rest?
Things like ckBTC are a great to look at to answer this. Chain Key technology, simply put in this context, allows for the IC to sign transactions on another blockchain in a trustless, bridgeless, non custodial manner. To my knowledge no other chain can do this. This is powered by CK technology.
You may be looking for this. There’s also a video at the bottom providing more detail. You may also want to look into “Noninteractive Distributed Key Generation”, if you’re curious about the specifics of key resharing.
But essentially the idea with ChainKey Cryptography is that the NNS subnet has had the same public key since Genesis; to anyone’s knowledge no one entity (not even a machine) has ever had access to more than a share of the matching secret key even though membership of the NNS subnet has changed over time; and it’s the only piece of information you require to ensure that a response from the IC is authentic.