Refresh When You Wake Up: Proactive Threshold Wallets with Offline Devices

Proactive security is the notion of defending a distributed system against an attacker who compromises different devices through its lifetime, but no more than a threshold number of them at any given time. The emergence of threshold wallets for more secure cryptocurrency custody warrants an efficient proactivization protocol tailored to this setting. While many proactivization protocols have been devised and studied in the literature, none of them have communication patterns ideal for threshold wallets. In particular a (t, n) threshold wallet is designed to have t parties jointly sign a transaction (of which only one may be honest) whereas even the best current proactivization protocols require at least an additional t -1 honest parties to come online simultaneously to refresh the system. In this work we formulate the notion of refresh with offline devices, where any tρ parties may proactivize the system at any time and the remaining n -tρ offline parties can non-interactively "catch up" at their leisure. However, many subtle issues arise in realizing this pattern. We identify that this problem is divided into two settings: (2, n) and (t, n) where t > 2. We develop novel techniques to address both settings as follows: