Can a canister have multiple principals?

Developers
1

As the title says. Can a canister send messages to other canisters forging a different principal each request? Can a canister send messages anonymously?

It seems like for self authenticated principals it is possible.

Internet Identity introduces a mechanism when a user could use a session key, but present for other canisters as some another principal, not connected mathematically to the session key.

I remember, @kpeacock once said that in order for it to work the team had to tweak a replica a little bit.
Can one elaborate on this a bit more? I see that this info exists, but it’s hidden from public behind this link.

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No. At least not at the moment.

A canister can use “canister signatures” to “sign” stuff with one of many principals derived from the canister id; this is the mechanism behind the Internet Identity. But it doesn’t work for inter-canister calls (which are not signed), only for ingress calls. Although it arguably would be a natural thing to allow.

The link you can’t access is the internal (and easier to read and navigate) rendering of the Interface Specification, but the content is also at https://sdk.dfinity.org/docs/interface-spec/index.html

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