Protocol Flow

This document details the operational flow of the TACo protocol - how information and operations move through the system. For an overview of the actors involved and their roles, see the UML Use Case Diagram.

The TACo protocol operations follow several distinct but interconnected flows:

Distributed Key Generation (DKG)

• Adopting developers (cohortAuthority) initiate and manage a one-time DKG initialization ritual at network setup

• The initialization produces a unified public key and each node maintains its own private key fragment

• The cohortAuthority manages parameters for the ritual and cohort composition

• A minimum of one honest party is required during DKG to ensure the secret material is not spoofed

Encryption with defined Access-Conditions

• Data producers use the public key generated by the DKG to encrypt their content locally

• Each encrypted payload can be accompanied by specific access conditions, allowing different payloads to have different condition sets

• Access conditions define who can access the encrypted data and when

• The distribution of the encrypted content (ciphertext) falls outside TACo's scope

Decryption Services

• Data consumers present encrypted content to nodes along with authentication

• Nodes independently verify that the consumer meets the payload's access conditions

• For each node that validates the conditions, a decryption fragment is provided to the consumer

• Once a threshold of nodes have provided their fragments, the consumer can locally combine these fragments to decrypt the content

Cohort Management

• Node participation is secured through economic staking in the TACo Nodes Network

• Cohorts can rotate members according to predefined rules set by the cohortAuthority

• The rotation rules can be tailored to balance security, availability, and decentralization needs

For a more detailed explanation of the protocol operations, see How TACo Works.

Integration Points

The protocol flow integrates with various TACo components:

• User applications interact with the TACo protocol through the Client SDK (taco-web)

• Access Conditions enables the definition and validation of conditional access to the encrypted data

• TACo Nodes Network provides the economic staking mechanism for node operators

• Coordinator contract manages cohort formation and DKG rituals on-chain

For details on how these components relate to each other architecturally, see Protocol Architecture.

For conceptual explanations of the protocol's design principles, see How TACo Works.