Solving Delegation Within Trust: Bob Transfers His House To Alice

It’s a long story, but Bob and Alice have split up and now only communicate through Trent — their trusted solicitor. But Bob has the deeds to the home they once lived in and now needs them to transfer to Alice. So can he create a trusted transfer of his home to Alice?

Trusted Delegation

One thing we have never done right in cybersecurity is trusted delegation. With this, we need a way of assigning certain rights to a third party and so they can perform a task for us. But one method to solve this is perhaps proxy re-encryption (PRE) and where we have a cryptographic transfer of assets. For this, let’s say that Alice is selling her home and has a trusted solicitor — Trent — and who will transfer the cryptographic artefact for her home to Bob. Trent thus needs to check that the funds have been transferred from Bob before the cryptographic artefact is re-assigned.

At the start of the deal, Bob will have a key paired with a public key and a private key. This is likely based on the sepc256k1 curve, where the private key is a scalar value (b), and the public key is an elliptic curve point (b.G). He will then encrypt the cryptographic artefact for his home with a symmetric key, and use this to encrypt the artefact. Next, he will take Alice’s public key and his own private key…