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CIP Title Authors Comments-URI Status Type Created License
16
Cryptographic Key Serialisation Formats
Luke Nadur <[email protected]>
Active
Standards
2020-12-21
Apache-2.0

Abstract

This CIP defines serialisation formats for the following types of cryptographic keys across the Cardano eco-system:

  • Regular Ed25519 keys

  • BIP32-Ed25519 extended keys (Ed25519 extended keys with BIP32-style derivation)

Motivation

Throughout the Cardano eco-system, different projects have used different serialisation formats for cryptographic keys.

For example, for BIP32-Ed25519 extended signing keys, the cardano-crypto implementation supports a 128-byte binary serialization format, while jcli and cardano-addresses supports a 96-byte binary serialization format.

Another example would be cardano-cli which supports a custom JSON format, referred to as "text envelope", (which can be used for serialising keys) that isn't supported by other projects in the eco-system.

This has introduced compatibility problems for both users and developers:

  • Users cannot easily utilize their keys across different tools and software in the Cardano eco-system as they may be serialized in different ways.

  • Developers wanting to support the different serialisation formats may need to write potentially error-prone (de)serialisation and conversion operations.

Therefore, this CIP aims to define standard cryptographic key serialisation formats to be used by projects throughout the Cardano eco-system.

Specification

Verification Keys

For the verification (public) key binary format, we simply use the raw 32-byte Ed25519 public key data.

This structure should be Bech32 encoded, using one of the appropriate *_vk prefixes defined in CIP-0005.

Extended Verification Keys

For extended verification (public) keys, we define the following 64-byte binary format:

+-----------------------+-----------------------+
| Public Key (32 bytes) | Chain Code (32 bytes) |
+-----------------------+-----------------------+

That is, a 32-byte Ed25519 public key followed by a 32-byte chain code.

This structure should be Bech32 encoded, using one of the appropriate *_xvk prefixes defined in CIP-0005.

Signing Keys

For the signing (private) key binary format, we simply use the raw 32-byte Ed25519 private key data.

This structure should be Bech32 encoded, using one of the appropriate *_sk prefixes defined in CIP-0005.

Extended Signing Keys

For extended signing (private) keys, we define the following 96-byte binary format:

+---------------------------------+-----------------------+
| Extended Private Key (64 bytes) | Chain Code (32 bytes) |
+---------------------------------+-----------------------+

That is, a 64-byte Ed25519 extended private key followed by a 32-byte chain code.

This structure should be Bech32 encoded, using one of the appropriate *_xsk prefixes defined in CIP-0005.

Rationale

Extended Signing Key Format

As mentioned in the Abstract, the original cardano-crypto implementation defined a 128-byte binary serialization format for BIP32-Ed25519 extended signing keys:

+---------------------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+
| Extended Private Key (64 bytes) | Public Key (32 bytes) | Chain Code (32 bytes) |
+---------------------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+

However, as it turns out, keeping around the 32-byte Ed25519 public key is redundant as it can easily be derived from the Ed25519 private key (the first 32 bytes of the 64-byte extended private key).

Therefore, because other projects such as jcli and cardano-addresses already utilize the more compact 96-byte format, we opt to define that as the standard.

Copyright

This CIP is licensed under Apache-2.0.