Google enters the crypto security battle with a new service for banks

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The new service is aimed at banks and other financial institutions. Google provides the technical infrastructure necessary for their curatorial business, rather than a wallet aimed at the general public.

Alphabet, its parent company, already uses the system to secure its own digital assets on Ethereum and Solana. Google does not, however, specify their nature or the amounts involved. The establishments participating in the trials are not named by the press either.

This initiative extends existing work. As early as 2023, Google Cloud explained how to build multi-party computing devices, or MPCs, with its Confidential Space infrastructure. Its publications notably presented an architecture allowing several stakeholders to participate in the authorization of a transaction.

The novelty therefore consists of bringing together these functions in a service dedicated to digital assets, including transaction signing, authorization rules and key recovery.

A private key allows you to authorize the movement of funds from a wallet. The MPC distributes this power between several participants: no fragment alone is enough to sign a transaction.

An institution can thus distribute the necessary elements between its own hardware and several cloud providers. Google already described this possibility in its reference architecture, which provides for distinct signing environments. The goal is to reduce the risk that a single compromise will allow assets to be moved.

The new product adds checks before signing: transfer ceilings, authorized destinations or multiple validations. According to Google, these checks run in Confidential Space, an isolated computing environment. This technology aims in particular to protect sensitive data against unauthorized access, including that of the cloud provider.

However, these protections do not remove the risks related to permissions or misconfiguration. Distributing signature elements limits certain attacks, but security also depends on who can modify the rules and approve operations.

Google is therefore preparing a technical offer to support the institutional conservation of cryptocurrencies. At this stage, the service remains reserved for test partners: its announcement does not yet correspond to general commercial availability. But it’s still great news.

With a background in literature and languages, I like to combine rigorous analysis with a taste for ideas to decipher the major economic and (geo)political issues linked to cryptocurrencies. Since 2021, I have been writing for Journal du Coin where I focus on subjects such as Bitcoin, MNBC, the tokenization of RWA and more broadly the strategic mutations of Web3. A passionate reader, curious about the world and the power relationships that structure it, I strive to make these themes accessible to all, with particular attention to projects designed for the general public.

Machine-translated from French