Decentralizing trust is a fundamental principle in the design of end-to-end encryption and cryptocurrency systems. A common issue in these applications is that users possess critical secrets. If these secrets are lost, users can lose precious data or assets. This issue remains a pain point in the adoption of these systems. Existing approaches such as backing up user secrets through a centralized service or distributing them across N mutually distrusting servers to preserve decentralized trust are either introducing a central point of attack or face usability issues by requiring users to authenticate N times, once to each of the N servers.

We present N-for-1-Auth, a system that preserves distributed trust by enabling a user to authenticate to N servers independently, with the work of only one authentication, thereby offering the same user experience as in a typical centralized system.