Securing Cryptographic Keys Through Google Confidential Computing and ORE ID

Last year, the cryptocurrency market increased to $2 trillion, due to the prolific rise of well-known cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether. Yet, an increase in cryptocurrency prices inevitably escalates cryptocurrency scams. 

In June 2021, the Federal Trade Commission reported that Americans lost more than $80 million in cryptocurrency investment scams since October 2020, a 1,000% increase in eight months. These scams typically follow a similar pattern, promising free crypto — often from a well-known celebrity — in exchange for your private key. 

In this nascent industry, it’s unreasonable to expect the average consumer to fully understand public versus private key cryptography, let alone the need for safeguarding these keys. Therefore, it is critical for blockchain solutions to be intuitive and provide the security that protects consumers and their private keys from hackers, phishing scams or accidental exposure.

Through Google Cloud’s Confidential Computing service, AIKON’s cross-chain identification and authorization platform, ORE ID, protect businesses and consumers — and their digital assets.  

Simple, Real-Time Encryption

Confidential Computing was introduced in 2020 as a breakthrough technology that allows customers, like AIKON, to protect private and sensitive data in the cloud — even while this information is still being processed. 

What’s more, the technology is designed to be user-friendly, an approach that AIKON strives for with every product offering. So it was natural that AIKON — as an early adopter — gravitated towards using Confidential Computing as the plumbing behind ORE ID. 

ORE ID creates cryptographic key pairs for users in the cloud. These keys interact with multiple blockchains — a novel concept in the blockchain industry because companies traditionally choose to use a single blockchain, due to the complexity of building with each.

To ensure AIKON’s non-custodial operation, Confidential Computing is used by ORE ID to ensure that even AIKON is unable to see decrypted keys when they are being used to sign, send and receive transactions on any application — and on AIKON’s own enterprise wallet offering, ORE Vault.

How ORE ID Uses Confidential Computing 

ORE ID’s end-to-end encryption process allows for the user to simply remember a password, not a private key — protecting consumers from sharing this sensitive information with potential scams.  

At the point of ORE ID sign-up, both public and private keys generate automatically in the cloud. Users are then prompted to enter a unique password, which is used to encrypt the private key. At no point is a private key shared and needed to be securely stored or remembered.

These keys are always encrypted at rest and the user’s password is not stored on the platform. The user only needs to provide this password to send from their ‘wallet’ account. The account information, including the encrypted key, can be imported directly to a software wallet without ever exposing the private key. 

Keys are then only decrypted within Google Cloud’s Confidential Computing environment using AIKON’s Trustless Signing Service — an open-source technology that allows for generating public and private keys, signing transactions and decrypting and re-encrypting different keys, all within a single call. Finally, encrypted keys are stored on Google’s Cloud Services Platform (CSP) server, which is whitelisted to be accessed only from AIKON’s backend server instances. 

Protect User’s Cryptographic Keys 

ORE ID’s architecture, bolstered by Google Cloud’s Confidential Computing, allows AIKON to operate non-custodial wallets in the cloud, without ever seeing the user’s private keys — ultimately protecting the user’s data.

Industry players including Algorand, Republic, Alliance Block, Meld and more use ORE ID to protect their identities and those of their customers.

Try ORE ID for free today and ensure the safety of your digital assets and those of your customers.


About AIKON

Blockchain and crypto are technologically complex. AIKON makes it simple. We’ve built a suite of intuitive products built on the ORE Network ($ORE) for enterprise companies looking to provide a seamless user experience that works cross-chain with Algorand, Ethereum, EOS and more.

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