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MPC, HSM, and multisig — after the Bybit postmortem
Institutional custody from first principles: the $1.5B Bybit attack chain, MPC-CMP vs HSM vs multisig tradeoffs, hot/warm/cold tiering, AWS Nitro Enclaves for signing, and DPRK threat modelling.
Bybit lost $1.5B not because their keys were weak — but because the interface operators used to review transactions was compromised. Custody architecture is not about key strength; it is about removing trust from every layer of the stack. These ten posts are the curriculum I wish existed before that incident.
A deep technical postmortem of the Bybit $1.5B hack: the Safe{Wallet} supply chain compromise, UI-layer spoofing, why hardware wallets failed, and the architectural controls that would have prevented it.
A practitioner's decision matrix for custody key management: multisig, HSM, and MPC-CMP compared across security, operational overhead, and cost — from someone who built all three.
The exact hot-warm-cold wallet architecture I designed at Upside for $500M+ AUM: tier ratios, sweep schedules, signing latency tradeoffs, insurance requirements, and threshold math.
How ZeroCopy Systems uses AWS Nitro Enclaves for hardware-attested wallet signing: vsock communication, KMS PCR attestation, the signing flow, and measured latency numbers.
GG18, GG20, FROST, and MuSig2 compared for engineers building MPC custody systems: protocol mechanics, round counts, the 2022 GG18 vulnerability, and when to use each.
After the Bybit hack I rewrote ZeroCopy's threat model. This documents DPRK's TraderTraitor TTPs and the specific controls that stop them — and the ones that don't.
BIP-32/39/44 HD wallet derivation explained for engineers: hardened vs normal derivation, entropy mistakes, multi-chain paths, and common implementation bugs from production custody work.
ERC-4337 account abstraction for institutional custody: UserOperation flow, session keys, social recovery, gas abstraction, and how ZeroCopy uses it for on-chain settlement.
Timing side channels, cache attacks, and Spectre in crypto signing services: why conditional branches on secret data are never safe, and how to implement constant-time operations correctly.
The complete key ceremony procedure I ran three times at Upside for $500M+ AUM custody: pre-ceremony checklist, air-gap procedures, quorum approval architecture, and catastrophic failure modes.