"Anyone who needs a modular cryptographic library for blockchain might find Hyperledger Ursa useful"

"Modularity will be the natural evolution of DLT platforms"

JAXenter: What is Hyperledger Ursa and why was it created? What is your endgame?

Hart Montgomery: Hyperledger Ursa is a modular and flexible cryptographic library intended, but not limited to, the use of other projects in Hyperledger. The goal of Ursa is to make it much safer and easier for our distributed registry projects to use existing, proven and reliable cryptographic libraries, but also new cryptographic implementations under development.

It was created because we realized that we would have saved efforts and improved security if we had cooperated with our cryptographic code. Its endgame is just a secure, modular cryptographic library that supports most of the common cryptographic needs for interoperably authorized blockchains.

JAXenter: who should use it? What are the cases of use of Hyperledger Ursa?

Hart Montgomery: We have designed Ursa to be used by other Hyperledger projects. However, anyone who needs a modular cryptographic library for blockchain might find Ursa useful.

JAXenter: what are its main advantages? Why should developers use it?

Hart Montgomery: The biggest advantages (for us) are due to the fact that Ursa concentrates the encryption and security skills in Hyperledger in one place. This means that we have more eyes on our algorithms and implementations and therefore are likely to make fewer security errors. Developers may want to use Ursa because of its modular structure: the modification of cryptographic schemes or protocols should be much simpler than the use of traditional libraries.

Developers may want to use Ursa because of its modular structure: the modification of cryptographic schemes or protocols should be much simpler than the use of traditional libraries.

JAXenter: Ursa will be written mainly in Rust but will have interfaces in all the languages ​​that are commonly used in Hyperledger. What languages ​​are we talking about?

Hart Montgomery: In the short term, we are talking about Go, Python and Java. In the longer term, it is not entirely clear. We will support what the community uses.

JAXenter: Hyperledger Ursa has two modules. Could you explain what it is?

Hart Montgomery: The first module concerns the basic encryption wrapped in a modular way. In this module, we incorporate libraries and standard implementations. The goal is to enable developers to use standard encryption in "plug and play" mode.

The second module, which we called zmix, contains more complicated, new and less standard encryption related to "smart" signing protocols (that is, threshold signatures) and to zero knowledge cryptographic protocols. These algorithms have become popular in blockchain applications recently and other Hyperledger projects have been interested in robust implementations.

JAXenter: Hyperledger The Ursa seems to be the first common component / module and a step towards modular DLT platforms, which share common components. What are the modular DLT platforms? Are they the natural evolution of DLT platforms?

Hart Montgomery: Great observation! For many of us, the long-term vision of Hyperledger is actually modular DLT platforms built with shared common components. DLT modular platforms consist of exactly the same things as standard DLT platforms, with the difference that it is easy to replace components in a modular DLT.

Examples of modular components certainly include, but are not limited to, cryptographic algorithms, consent protocols, data storage mechanisms (database type), identity management systems, intelligent / contract code interpreters, and much more. Since probably there will not be a single DLT configuration that works for all (or even many) blockchain applications, we think that modularity will be the natural evolution of DLT platforms.

SEE ALSO: "Hyperledger Fabric is now more accessible to developers who have already started working with Ethereum and its associated tools"

JAXenter: what should we expect from Hyperledger Ursa in the future? What are the plans for 2019?

Hart Montgomery: In the short run, we hope to make Ursa work so that Hyperledger Indy will use it. We expect this to happen relatively early, as the code base is relatively consistent with the current cryptographic library of Indy. In the next year, we hope to incorporate the capabilities that other Hyperledger DLT projects need to use Ursa for their encryption, probably starting with Hyperledger Sawtooth. In addition, we plan to add more new protocols focusing on zmix knowledge in the next year.

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