Principle of super signature
We often hear about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In this article, we will discuss the concept of super signature and how it works as a principle in a blockchain transaction.
Principles of super signature
A super signature (超级签名) is a concept used in blockchain technology. It is a way to prove that a transaction has been authorized by a group of people. This can be used to prevent fraud and ensure the integrity of a network.
Super signatures can also be used for other purposes, such as signing contracts or sharing private keys between multiple parties without giving away control over the money owned by those parties.
Best described by the following example
The basic idea of super signer or the principle can be best described by the following example. Consider a man who has married 7 women and has just died in an accident. Now, you have to issue a death certificate to each widow but how do you identify each widow?
The principle is as follows: All the wives must come together and decide on one among them to represent all of them before issuing their husband’s death certificate. This woman will be called a super-signer (超级签名服务)for this purpose because she will sign on behalf of all seven wives without herself knowing who else signed it along with her.
A man married to 7 women has just died in an accident
The basic idea of super signer or the principle can be best described by the following example.
A man married to 7 women has just died in an accident. Now, you have to issue a death certificate to each widow. But how do you identify each widow?
Issued certificate
The wife’s identity is tied up to the husband’s identity and there is no way for the widows to prove their relationship with the man. In this case, all of them will get a certificate from a peer group but none of them will be able to provide any proof of the certificate gets issued by you. This goes against the principle of uniqueness which states that each object has only one unique identifier. The unique identifier in our case would be your digital signature on your marriage certificate; however, it can’t prove anything if it is being shared among multiple people as per our earlier example where everyone possessed an identical copy of this information (with only a few exceptions).
However, if another set of 7 widows turns up claiming that they are also his wife, then the peer group will reject this claim as now 14 widows are claiming to be married to the same man and this goes against the principle of uniqueness.
While this may be a far-fetched example
While this may be a far-fetched example, it’s not that different from what happens in real life. For example, take the case of Bitcoin – where there are miners who go through all transactions in a network and verify them.
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that functions on a decentralized ledger (a public blockchain). All users who are members of the Bitcoin network participate in verifying transactions on this network. A transaction is verified by other members when they do simple mathematical calculations to ensure that no Bitcoins have been spent twice (double-spend problem). The miner who finds out first verifies the transaction and gets rewarded with new Bitcoins for their efforts.
Bitcoin has an interesting property called Proof-of-Work which ensures that only honest actors can participate as miners on their network because doing so requires high compute resources (CPU/GPU).
Last
I believe the example given above is enough to describe the concept of super signature. As always, I hope this article was helpful and you learned something new.