Human Keys – How They Work and Why They’re the Future of Secure Digital Identity

The Need for a New Approach to Key Management

In Part 1, we explored key management, the challenges of securing private keys, and how Holonym’s Mishti Network, enables protected self custody of wallets without leaning in on any centralized mechanism, thereby abstracting key management and simplifying authentication. Human Keys combines the security of Public Key Infrastructure with the familiarity of everyday inputs like passwords and biometrics for private key generation. 

Building on that foundation, this part delves deeper into the mechanics of Human Keys—how they work, how they are set up, and why they represent the best option for secure digital digital interactions and identity management. 

What Are Human Keys?

Human Keys are a novel concept introduced by Holonym Foundation that allow users to generate secure private keys using familiar, human-friendly inputs. Unlike traditional private keys, which are typically generated from random seed phrases, Human Keys derive their security from inputs that users already know and use regularly, such as passwords, email addresses, or biometric data.

The key innovation behind Human Keys is their ability to transform these low-entropy inputs into high-entropy private keys that are resistant to brute force attacks. This is achieved through advanced cryptographic techniques like the threshold Verifiable Oblivious Pseudorandom Function (tVOPRF) used in Holonym’s Mishti Network. This approach makes key management more intuitive for users while maintaining the high level of security required for interaction and self custody of digital assets and identities.

Entropy Secures Private Keys

Entropy is a measure of randomness or unpredictability in a system. In cryptography, high entropy is crucial for generating strong private keys that are resistant to guessing or brute-force attacks. The security of private keys directly correlates with their entropy level.

While familiar authentication methods like passwords, security questions, and biometrics are user-friendly, they often suffer from low entropy. Passwords have predictable patterns on personal information, security questions can be socially engineered, and contrary to the popular belief biometrics like face and palm scans have lower entropy than commonly thought.

Modern technologies, including machine learning and quantum computing, can potentially crack these low-entropy systems. The misconception of biometrics as high-entropy is particularly dangerous, as they can be compromised.

How Human Keys Work: The Technical Backbone

At the core of Human Keys is the idea that secure private keys can be generated from inputs that are easy for users to remember and manage. However, because these inputs—such as passwords—typically have low entropy, they need to be transformed into something much more secure. Here’s how this process works:

1. Input Collection: The user provides a familiar input, such as a password or biometric data, which is easy to recall for seamless authentication, reducing the risk of losing access. If the input is forgotten, it can be securely recovered in a trustless setup without relying on centralized authorities.
2. tVOPRF Transformation: The provided input becomes the seed for generating a high-entropy private key by  running a threshold Verifiable Oblivious Pseudorandom Function (tVOPRF). 

Key Components:

• Pseudorandom Function enables the creation of high-entropy keys from low-entropy inputs.
• The "oblivious" part means that the network processing the data can't see or learn the user's input. 
• The threshold mechanism ensures that no single node has control over key generation, making it distributed. 
• This process is one-way;  the original input can't be derived from the output.
• Honest contribution of nodes are verifiable through zero knowledge proofs, ensuring integrity of the network

3. Recovery Process: User inputs are encrypted to Mishti, a decentralized network during sign up. If users need to recover their keys, they simply prove ownership of their identifier (such as an email) through a Zero-Knowledge Proof submitted to Mishti. This enables secure key recovery without exposing any sensitive information.

Privacy Consideration during Key Generation:

1. The user's data is masked before being sent to the network, ensuring that no node can see the actual input.
2. The network performs computations on this masked data, further protecting user privacy.

Why Mishti as an Actively Validated Service

EigenLayer expands the capital efficiency of ETH by using staked ETH to provide economic security for services built on top of it. Currently, with 3.64 million ETH and 70 million EIGEN restaked (totaling $9.1 billion), EigenLayer’s economic security makes it an ideal foundation for Mishti, particularly as Human Keys address the critical issue of private key management.

Given that Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is used in creating Human Keys, Mishti leverages EigenLayer's continuous validation and anti-collusion design. This ensures a secure environment for processing sensitive data, with no single node having access to all the information.

EigenLayer’s dual-token system supports on-chain verifiability for objective problems and community-driven resolution for subjective issues. This, combined with decentralized governance, the reputation of EigenLayer operators, and alignment with Ethereum’s ethos, makes EigenLayer a strong fit for Mishti.

Setting Up and Using Human Keys

One of the key advantages of Human Keys is their ease of setup and use. Here’s how users can create and manage their Human Keys:

1. Creating a Human Key:
   • Step 1: The user signs up through a platform that supports Human Keys, such as Holonym’s Silk onboarding wallet.
   • Step 2: During the signup process, the user provides a familiar input, such as a password or biometric data.
   • Step 3: The input is processed by the Mishti Network’s tVOPRF, generating a secure private key.
   • Step 4: The private key is securely stored, and the user can begin using it for digital interactions.
2. Using a Human Key:
   • Once the Human Key is generated, the user can use it to sign transactions, authenticate their identity, or access secure services. The familiar input ensures that the process is intuitive and user-friendly. 
3. Recovering a Human Key:
   • For,e.g to decrypt their password if forgotten, the user generates a ZKP proving they own the wallet associated with their encrypted password.

Why Human Keys Offer Superior Security

When it comes to security, Human Keys offer several key advantages over traditional methods:

1. High Entropy and Resistance to Attacks: Despite being generated from low-entropy inputs, Human Keys are highly secure due to the tVOPRF transformation. This ensures that the resulting private key has a high level of randomness, making it resistant to brute force attacks.
2. Decentralized: The key generation and recovery is managed by a decentralized network, ensuring key shares are distributed, no single node can see the underlying data during computation, and economic security of Eigen Layer makes it impossible to collude, given the high economic stake and reputational stake of being an Eigen Layer operator. 
3. Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Enhanced Privacy: The use of ZKPs ensures that the key generation process is verifiable without revealing any sensitive information about the user’s input. This adds an extra layer of privacy and security to the system.
4. User Controlled Authentication: The private key generated through the Mishti network is distributed using Pera’s 2PC-MPC (Two-Party Computation Multi-Party Computation) network, ensuring that neither the network nor the user can sign transactions independently. This dual-control system makes Human Keys extremely resistant to attacks, even in cross-chain environments where vulnerabilities often occur during inter-chain operations.

Comparison with Other Key Management Solutions

To highlight the advantages of Human Keys, it’s useful to compare them with other key management solutions:

Conclusion: The Future of Secure Digital Identity with Human Keys

As the digital world becomes increasingly decentralized, the need for secure, user-friendly key management solutions will continue to grow. Human Keys represent a significant step forward in this evolution, offering a solution that is both secure and accessible.

Holonym Foundation’s Mishti Network, along with its related protocols such as Silk and Zeronym, provides the technical foundation for this innovative approach. Together, they offer a comprehensive, decentralized solution for secure digital identity management, paving the way for a future where users can take full control of their online identities with confidence.