Elliptic-curve cryptography and support in Golang

wesl_ee

Playing around with some concepts laid out in the design document, I've found that Go's native "crypto/elliptic" package doesn't support a secp256k1 curve [1]. It does support a very similar curve, secp256r1, which seems to be comparable. I generated a key pair using OpenSSL (NIST calls this curve "prime256v1" but they are equvalent)) and was able to sign things with this pair in Go.

Though it is easy to change now, this also got me thinking about how we would go about swapping ECCs in the future if we ever needed to. I think the procedure should be easy but it is something to still keep in mind.

[1] https://golang.org/pkg/crypto/elliptic/#Curve

PeerZero

The initial command line client is here: https://github.com/PeernetOfficial/Cmd

In the file "Test_test.go" it contains some debug functions to play around with encryption/decryption.

I agree that it makes sense to come up with a standard on how we can evaluate (and swap out) any encryption/hashing algorithm in the future if needed. I wouldn't see a problem if future clients would support 2 schemes and just try out both for incoming packets and see which one validates the signature. After a while (could be either measured in years or % adoption of the network or both) the first scheme could be dropped.

anyla11

https://talk.peernet.org/discussion/17/elliptic-curve-cryptography-and-support-in-golang

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