FREEON

FOSS Resists Extralegal Executive Overreaching Nations

FREEON implements FROST (RFC 9591) to allow geographically distributed teams produce digital signatures.

Each share of the signing key is encrypted locally using age.

Warning

This software is a minimum viable product (MVP) and is only in the alpha stage of development. It has not been audited. Do not use this in production yet!

This project is not affiliated with the Chemours Company.

Installation

Freeon Clients

go install github.com/soatok/freeon/client@latest

For Developers

You can also clone the repository to install the client locally:

git clone https://github.com/soatok/freeon.git
cd freeon/client
go install

Freeon Coordinators

Warning

The coordinator is expected to run on a private network, such as Tailscale, ZeroTier, or within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) from AWS, Azure, or GCP.

In the future, we will develop a standalone coordinator that can safely be deployed on the public-facing Internet, but this was cut from the alpha release due to time constraints.

git clone https://github.com/soatok/freeon.git
cd freeon
go build -o coordinator ./coordinator
./coordinator

Usage

The order of operations is as followed:

1. Perform the Distributed Key Generation ceremony once, for each Ed25519 keypair.
   1. One client tell the coordinator to initiate a new DKG. The number of parties and threshold are required at this step.
   2. The coordinator sets up a session that other clients can connect to, and gives the DKG Group ID to the client. This is to be shared with other users. The Group ID is not sensitive; it only serves to allow multiple keys be managed by one Freeon coordinator.
   3. Once every participating user enrolls in the DKG ceremony, the final public key is calculated and shared with each participant.
   4. Each client encrypts their Shamir Share, along with their Party ID and the group identifier, locally.
2. For each message to be signed:
   1. One client proposes a message to be signed to the coordinator.
   2. Each participating client connects and commits to the message (FROST Round 1).
   3. Each participating client connects and publishes their share of the final signature (FROST Round 2).
   4. The coordinator aggregates the signature and releases it to each connected client.

We will document each command in tandem with this order of operations.

Distributed Key Generation

To initiate a new DKG group, one of the clients with access to the coordinator will run the following command (replace 7 and 3 with the number of participants and threshold needed to perform a signature operation, respectively):

freeon keygen create -h hostname:port -n 7 -t 3

Upon success, a Group ID will be returned. This is to be shared with the other participants, who will pass it as an extra argument:

freeon keygen join -h hostname:port -g [group-id-goes-here]

This will maintain a connection with the coordinator until all n participants have connected. Afterwards, a copy of the public key will be returned to each client.

Optional Arguments

If you provide a public key (-r [RECIPIENT]) as an optional argument, the Freeon client will use age to encrypt the share locally. This public key can be an age public key or an OpenSSH public key.

Signature Generation

Initiate Signature Ceremony

To initiate a key ceremony, the following information is needed:

1. The Group ID used during Key Generation.
2. The message intended to be signed.

The message can be passed as a file name or via STDIN, like so:

freeon sign create -g [group-id-goes-here] file-with-message.txt
echo -n "MESSAGE TO BE SIGNED" | freeon sign create -g [group-id-goes-here]

This will initialize a signature in progress and return a Ceremony ID.

Note

You do not need a key share to initiate a signature proposal. This is an intentional design feature to allow CI/CD pipelines queue up a Signature Ceremony that clients can then opt into participating in.

Optional Arguments

By default, the final signature will be returned as a 128-character hex-encoded string (encoded as R || z). You can pass an optional --openssh flag to return an OpenSSH-compatible signature.

freeon sign create --openssh -g [group-id-goes-here] file-with-message.txt
echo -n "MESSAGE TO BE SIGNED" | freeon sign create --openssh -g [group-id-goes-here]

Terminating Incomplete Ceremonies

You can run this command to flush any incomplete ceremonies.

freeon terminate [ceremony-id-goes-here]

Warning

You do not need privileged access to perform this step.

Participate In Signature Ceremony

Each client will need to run this command to participate in the ceremony.

freeon sign join -c [ceremony-id] file-with-message.txt
echo -n "MESSAGE TO BE SIGNED" | freeon sign join -c [ceremony-id]

# Identical:
freeon sign join --ceremony [ceremony-id] file-with-message.txt
echo -n "MESSAGE TO BE SIGNED" | freeon sign join --ceremony [ceremony-id]

Optional Arguments

You can furthermore pass the -i or --identity flag to specify the file path for your age secret keys.

freeon sign join -c [ceremony-id] -i /path/to/age.keys file-with-message.txt
echo -n "MESSAGE TO BE SIGNED" | freeon sign join -i /path/to/age.keys -c [ceremony-id]

# Identical
freeon sign join --ceremony [ceremony-id] --identity /path/to/age.keys file-with-message.txt
echo -n "MESSAGE TO BE SIGNED" | freeon sign join --identity /path/to/age.keys --ceremony [ceremony-id]