Lab Name

Agora

Short Description

Agora serves as a specialized lab, purposefully designed to function as a secure and collaborative environment for the implementation and advancement of cryptography libraries and software. Much like the ancient Greek agora served as a gathering place for assemblies and open markets, this lab is tailored to incorporate cryptography protocols that facilitate experimentation, development, and eventual application integration. While its primary focus is on production-ready usage, Agora also accommodates research code contributions.

Numerous libraries featured in Agora are already in active use within production systems. By incorporating them into the lab, we ensure greater continuity and reliability, mitigating the risk of code vanishing due to a single developer’s involvement and ensuring proper licensing and management. Although the code aspires to represent optimized, production-ready software, we welcome code audits and acknowledge the possibility of lingering bugs. It falls upon the end user to conduct their own due diligence and collaborate with our lab maintainers to enhance and deliver improved products to the market.

Scope of Lab

The lab’s scope encompasses the development and nurturing of cryptography libraries and programs, fostering a secure and collaborative space for these endeavors. Our mission aligns with the Greek agora’s spirit, providing a platform for the creation, refinement, and dissemination of cryptographic protocols. These protocols are intended not only for experimentation but also for integration into real-world applications. While our primary focus is on facilitating the production use of cryptography, we also welcome research-oriented contributions.

Within this scope, the lab’s purpose extends to include existing libraries that are already in use within production systems. By hosting them in this environment, it ensures their continued existence, offering stability and proper licensing and management.

These libraries help further the Hyperledger mission by facilitating cryptography that is friendly to blockchains. Many blockchains use their own cryptography implementations which generally are basic and not suited for decentralized settings. Algorithms like distributed key generation, threshold signing and decryption are offered. The lab is not necessarily restricted to the blockchain setting as they can function anywhere also.

One last goal of the lab is to have the Linux Foundation own the code i.e. it cannot be claimed by any single entity or corporation as their own. They may fork and maintain their own copies and derivative work but the original source is retained here.

Initial Committers

  • https://github.com/mikelodder7

Sponsor

  • Stephen Curran - https://github.com/swcurran

Pre-existing repository

  • https://github.com/mikelodder7/blsful
  • https://github.com/mikelodder7/gennaro-dkg
  • https://github.com/mikelodder7/unknown_order
  • https://github.com/mikelodder7/soteria-rs
  • https://github.com/mikelodder7/vsss-rs
  • https://github.com/mikelodder7/curvey
  • https://github.com/mikelodder7/blstrs
  • https://github.com/mikelodder7/bls12_381_plus
  • https://github.com/mikelodder7/glass_pumpkin
  • https://github.com/mikelodder7/paillier-rs
  • https://github.com/mikelodder7/verifiable-encryption
  • https://github.com/mikelodder7/fernet