Fusion Foundation, a non-profit organization on a mission to build the next generation financial infrastructure, announced that it has engaged in a joint initiative with highly esteemed cryptologists Rosario Gennaro, Professor of Computer Science at CUNY, Steven Goldfeder, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, Louis Goubin, Professor of Computer Science at University of Versailles and Pascal Paillier, Ph.D., CEO and Senior Security Expert at CryptoExperts to accelerate the implementation of Fusion’s highly anticipated interoperability and distributed custody solution, Distributed Control Rights Management (DCRM).

Gennaro and Goldfeder co-authored numerous publications on Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) that inspired the architecture of DCRM. ECDSA is the current cryptographic algorithm that secures the Bitcoin blockchain by ensuring that only the rightful custodian of a bitcoin has the capacity to spend it.

“At the core of Fusion’s mission has been interoperability and building the highest grade secure distributed custodial solutions through our DCRM technology. We are privileged to be collaborating with four of the brightest and most creative minds in cryptography to validate, certify and help enhance our DCRM architecture,” stated Dejun Qian, Founder of Fusion. “Together, we plan to tackle decentralized secure custody and provide new scalable, efficient and reliable solutions for the digital assets community.”

Gennaro and Goldfeder’s specific focus is the theoretical application of distributed threshold signature schemes to ECDSA and Edwards-curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA). The possibility of numerous participants or nodes in a distributed network collaborating cryptographically to sign a message is a fundamental key to unlocking distributed custody.

During this first phase of research, Gennaro and Goldfeder will analyze the theoretical basis of Fusion’s ECDSA implementation that would enable DCRM to support additional crypto-assets.

DCRM or Distributed Control Rights Management is a Fusion innovation that seeks to solve one of the blockchain community's largest hurdles, interoperability. This is accomplished by using a decentralized approach to security. A private key is split into individual shards and then distributed to nodes within the network. The signing of the transaction takes place without requiring that the key be re-assembled. Applications for this revolutionary approach include decentralized custody and interoperability. Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) are also looking to DCRM to introduce scalability across all of the various crypto asset networks.

For security review and optimization, Pascal Paillier, the inventor of the Paillier cryptosystem, and Louis Goubin, head of the Cryptology and Information Security Group at University of Versailles, will join the Shanghai team to ensure the DCRM meets the highest security standards and is optimized for superior performance. The Paillier cryptosystem is a probabilistic asymmetric algorithm for public key cryptography which the Fusion DCRM uses extensively.