# Key Management

The key that never exists — one MPC core under every vault, included in every plan.

Classical custody protects a private key by putting it somewhere hard to reach: an HSM, a safe, a
signed procedure. Vaultody removes the thing being protected. Key material is generated in shares,
used in shares and backed up in shares, and the committee holding them includes a party you
operate.

## Generated distributed, used distributed

- **Nothing assembles the whole key** — not during keygen, not during signing, not during backup.
- **Your party is mandatory** — a vault runs Vaultody's two server nodes plus your party: your
  phone, or a co-signer you host. Remove your party and the vault stops signing.
- **Both curve families are native** — DKLS23 for ECDSA chains and FROST for EdDSA, so no chain is
  a second-class citizen. What reaches the chain is one ordinary signature.
- **One public key, one set of addresses** per vault, with hardware-backed storage on mobile and
  inter-party traffic encrypted end to end.
- **The same core on every plan** — no add-on security SKUs. Plans scale capacity, not security.

## Backed up to a key only you hold

Each party's share is exported wrapped to an RSA public key you generate on your own machine, and
recovery runs in a public, MIT-licensed, offline tool. When a device or a colleague changes, a
reshare rotates every share while preserving the public key and every address. Thresholds extend
to 3-of-4 and 3-of-5, and the extra parties are always yours.

## What key management does not do

If your party is offline, the vault does not sign — the guarantee working, not an outage. There is
no escrow: lose the RSA private key that wraps your backup and Vaultody cannot restore it for you.

## FAQ

**Which protocols does the core run?**
DKLS23 for ECDSA and FROST for EdDSA. Both are native to the same core, so an approval on Solana
behaves like one on Ethereum.

**Can Vaultody move our funds?**
No. Two of the three parties are ours and one is yours, so our nodes cannot reach a signing quorum
without you.

## Related

- [Key Shards & Recovery](/features/key-shards-and-recovery)
- [Vaultody MPC](/multi-party-computation)
- [Server Co-Signer](/features/server-co-signer)
- [Mobile Co-signer](/features/mobile-co-signer)