Protocol · CELAR DOCS
Threshold key management: the key that never exists
If state is encrypted, the obvious question is: who holds the key? Celar's answer: no one, ever. The TFHE decryption key exists only as shares spread across a 100-seat committee — generated by a distributed ceremony, never reconstructed anywhere, at any time, including during recovery.
How it works
- Distributed key generation. A publicly verifiable ceremony produces key shares with published transcripts; misbehaving participants are excluded before genesis.
- 79-of-100 threshold. Any decryption or re-encryption requires 79 seats to cooperate. Every partial decryption is signed, attributable, and fraud-provable — unauthorized service is severely slashed.
- Proactive resharing. Shares refresh every epoch, making old shares useless. An attacker must corrupt 79 seats within a single epoch, against seats that rotate on staggered 25-epoch terms.
- Noise-flooded decryption. Authorized partial decryptions carry calibrated noise so repeated decryptions stay safe even against adversarially crafted ciphertexts.
A security number you can check
Most chains say "decentralized." Celar states a bound: the probability that an adversary holding 55% of eligible stake captures a decryption quorum within a rolling 10-year window is ≤ 1 in 10,000 — a constitutional constant, re-derived annually and on any parameter change, weakening it is hard-fork-only. On top sits the live health rule ℋ ≥ 2: attacking must always cost at least twice what it could steal.
Honest limitation: the FHE tier's privacy is conditional on this committee (a ≥79-seat coalition could decrypt); the ZK pool is deliberately independent of it. Even disaster recovery is public-by-construction — timelocked, transcript-published, resharing-only. No covert decryption path exists.