Welcome to the Collective Authority (Cothority) discussion group.

This group is intended for open discussion related to collective authorities, scalable trust-splitting and decentralisation techniques, and practical uses of cryptographic multisignatures.

The term "cothority" derives from the cothority project at EPFL and the concept's instantiation in CoSi, a scalable collective signing protocol to produce multisignatures among many participants efficiently. CoSi enables authorities to have their statements collectively signed (co-signed) by a diverse, decentralized, and scalable group of (potentially thousands of) witnesses and, for example, could be employed to proactively harden critical Internet authorities. Among other things, one could imagine applications to the Certificate Transparency project, DNSSEC, software distribution, the Tor anonymity network or cryptocurrencies.

For background on the cothority project at EPFL and the CoSi protocol see the the GitHub project page and these papers:

New cothorities nodes

Ludovic Barman