Encryption & Cryptography

For encrypting and decrypting individual pieces of content for storage within the Privy ecosystem, AES-256 symmetric key encryption is used. Alongside being utilized primarily and actively by federal governments and industry, NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) has described AES-256 as less impacted by sufficiently large quantum computing, quoting “larger key sizes needed”. For peer-to-peer exchange of encrypted data, we further utilize on-chain Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Both AES-256 and the private keys necessary for DHKE are generated locally by the client in an end-to-end encrypted manner.