Born out of a hackathon at TABCONF 2024, Frostr might have simply solved Nostr’s most pernicious problem: 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 mission was based by Topher (cmdruid) who made his title as a Bitcoin engineer for growing Tapscript — a preferred 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 unravel this apparently easy downside.
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 will depend on trusted third events like Fb which are too massive to care about any particular person buyer and basically have the facility to vary the foundations 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 might be wielded. Maybe the best-known illustration of that is the elimination 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 tip 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 downside with the “decentralization” of id that’s but to be solved.
Trendy-Day Financial institution Theft
Identity techniques are a crucial layer of society. Whether or not you’re a citizen of Rome 2,000 years in the past or of america in the present day, doorways open and shut based mostly on what ID you maintain. At the moment’s techniques, as superior as they could appear, depend on a pre-digital conception of id and safety: They depend upon authenticating your face.
The ID card itself, whether or not your driver’s license or passport, helps authorities workers, financial institution tellers and bar bouncers everywhere in the world do a quite simple factor: Determine in the event you appear to be the particular person on the official card, after which kind out if you’re 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 had been within the pre-internet world: Many individuals have printed their full names and footage to Fb, and a collection of hacks have leaked tons of SSN information 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 by way of the doorways of their native financial institution, they’d achieve this to take the money, gold and tradable valuables saved within the vaults.
However that’s not how issues work. Within the digital age, cash is not money. Fiat funds are sometimes reversible, so in the event you hack right into a financial institution and transfer cash to your account one way or the other, not solely can that be reversed, however you simply uncovered a hyperlink to your id.
At the moment, the net equal of a robber just isn’t seeking to steal money, gold or different valuables, however somewhat, private id information.
That information 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 information vaults hacked and their contents bought on the darkish internet for pennies on the greenback, however AI is enhancing rapidly and has already handed the Turing check of picture era. We’re at a degree the place rogue actors can create pretend selfies holding pretend IDs with leaked person information and idiot the gatekeepers to your digital wealth.
This menace is prone to incentivize change, and you may see the brand new efforts by tech corporations and authorities establishments to improve id techniques. Take California’s cellular 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 typically. ID.me takes the same strategy 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 information, combining it with mass surveillance instruments seen within the social credit score rating techniques being constructed up in China.
To have an opportunity at curbing what looks like 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 information. We’d like an id system that doesn’t depend on our face.
Enter Nostr, a Bitcoin-Period Identity and Social Media Protocol
Born out of the Bitcoin developer ecosystem, Nostr has rapidly grown right into a social media community in its personal proper.
An abbreviation of “Notes and Other 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 basically democratizes the web away from its present construction, it opens up a complete new set of prospects for social media.
Proponents of Nostr argue that customers can lastly personal their very own information and not must depend upon the charity or benevolence of the Silicon Valley giants once they determine to maneuver platforms or choose the improper political social gathering.
Nostr works through a distributed client-server community topology, which lets you entry content material throughout numerous servers referred to 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 may grant you entry and help you publish your ideas.
The dream of Nostr is to unlock a brand new era of social media know-how that doesn’t flip customers into merchandise by mining their information, that doesn’t pressure 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 pretend accounts attempting 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 fame into one cryptographically managed id. Although that’s not at present a follow in Nostr, it’s a downside moderately effectively solved in a decentralized approach by Keybase.
However, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Pushing id possession to the sides comes with a complete new set of issues that up till now have probably not been solved and which have personally held me again from investing in build up my model on Nostr.
No Password Resets
There’s at present no actual technique 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 bought it. (You each have the key, so nobody has unique management of it.)
It is a large problem. Though the examples of such hacks are usually not too frequent, they’re a major deterrent for manufacturers that 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 sorts with the identical person identities and implies that customers give their personal keys to a number of shoppers, thus multiplying the danger of compromise.
One layer of protection that has been constructed up and turn out to be widespread in consequence is the thought of an exterior signer, usually a browser extension like Alby that helps handle your personal key as a type of password supervisor, facilitating signing of content material for you on the assorted Nostr platforms.
Whereas this works effectively sufficient in the present day it doesn’t remedy the basic downside. One mistake and the nym is successfully compromised, the worth of that built-up model or fame not simply harmed however probably exploitable by scammers carrying your id to harass your mates or prospects.
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 achieved with your id — not a pretend 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?
Effectively, 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 social gathering who can replace a central database and offer you 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 rapidly getting into the market is Frost, a Schnorr-based key administration and key rotation scheme that achieves comparable 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 Nineties. A number of 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 yr Chelsea Komlo and Ian Goldberg printed “FROST: Flexible Round-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 generally known as 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, cut up up into three shares of 12 phrases every. Any two shares mixed might be assembled into the grasp personal key of the pockets, whereas anybody share alone is inadequate to compromise or get better entry to the account.
Right here’s a two-minute video clarification 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, probably 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 title. It additionally adapts the know-how to single-user wallets, somewhat than industrial-grade, multi-user schemes, permitting less complicated 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). Just 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 secure 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 a substitute.
The outcome? A serious piece of the decentralized social media puzzle is unlocked: Trustless identities with password resets that don’t depend upon centralized gatekeepers for authentication.
The implications of this innovation, if fruitful, are basic. The Nostr ecosystem can be sensible to check out Frostr; it would simply be sufficient of a safety and UI enchancment that a complete new era of non-biometric, trustless digital identities, and sovereign information possession use circumstances are unlocked for the Bitcoin age.
For a deeper dive into Frostr, try their web site at Frostr.org or take a look at this podcast I recorded with Topher and Austin on the subject.
