FAQ
Q: How does DECO relate to Town Crier?
A: The two are complementary. DECO achieves much of the functionality that Town Crier does, but without trusted hardware. That said, Town Crier is more powerful and performant, and a better choice where trusted hardware is available to and trusted by users.
Q: How does DECO relate to TLSNotary?
A: While similar in structure (and groundbreaking work), TLSNotary does not support modern versions of TLS (v1.2 and v1.3) and lacks many of the privacy-preserving capabilities of DECO.
Q: What kind of cryptography does DECO use?
A: DECO uses secure function evaluation (two-player secure multiparty computation) to share TLS session data securely between an oracle and user. It uses zero-knowledge proofs to enable users to prove facts about TLS session data to an oracle. The technical paper explains some of the new ideas needed to make these techniques work in DECO, as well as techniques required to interpret server data correctly.
Q: Does DECO require any special type of server-side (website) support, i.e., special software on websites from which users obtain data?
A: No. Its use is completely transparent to a server. In other words, a server has no awareness of a user’s (client’s) use of DECO.
Q: Can DECO be used to steal data from websites?
A: While its transparency means a website doesn’t know that DECO is in use, DECO is only used to prove the authenticity of website data to an oracle. An oracle would need to be complicit in data theft, and oracles are capable of stealing data on their own, in the sense of relaying data without permission from the source. For many reasons, we expect in general that oracle services will be careful about what data they export from websites.
Q: What are the limitations of DECO?
A: DECO can be used with any website and any type of data. It can efficiently prove simple facts about user data, but proving complex facts over large amounts of data is computationally impractical. Additionally, DECO requires application installation by users and oracles.
Q: Is DECO open-source?
A: We will be releasing DECO source code. DECO is patent-pending, but our intention is to see that it can be used freely by academic researchers and a large segment of the permissionless blockchain community.
Q: Are you planning to launch your own oracle service or oracle company using DECO?
A: We have no such plans at this time.
Q: What's the meaning behind this beautiful logo?
A: The DECO logo (right) consists of three hands holding each other, symbolizing the main component of the DECO protocol: the three-party handshake between the user, oracle, and website server. Moreover, the three hands form a circle, resembling the letter "O" as in Oracle.
