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Ready to Sign … Go Get a Witness And Make Them Nice and CoSi?
We have seen the problems in the US elections, and where if one partner (eg Donald Trump) doesn’t think the election is fair, they could declare the election as null and void. This is not good for trust. And so, in our elections, we rely on witnesses to prove that votes have been cast correctly, and where it is unlikely that someone who is defrauding the system will be able to do so in front of witnesses to their votes. We also do this when we are signing a document, and where we must gather witnesses to our signature. The more witnesses we can gain, the likely less chance our signature will be fake. So let’s see if we can scale this concept into a large scale network.
An attack point on a network is the release of the private key. To overcome this we can collectively sign, and where we have witness co-signing. With this, every message is publicly witnessed before it is accepted. Each message (M) is then collectively signed by W witnesses. An attacker is likely to be spotted by at least one of the witnesses. One of the most interesting of these is CoSi (collective signing) [paper]:
