Protocol suite for chain-key ED25519?

Developers
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Hello. I’ve come here through learning about the chain-key integrations which open up exciting possibilities.

I am interested in integrating Nano (XNO) which uses ED25519 rather than ECDSA like BTC, ETH.

Can anyone comment on the work needed to support ED25519 coins for chain-key integrations?

Thank you.

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Are you interested in doing the work yourself or you want to know if the foundation would be interested in integrating these two Blockchains?

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I’m interested in working on this myself if need be. But first we need to find out what’s involved from the experts here who’ve already worked on the existing integrations.

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Can anyone comment on the feasibility of this? It seems like a useful thing to implement since ECDSA is essentially deprecated where compatibility with BTC or ETH signatures is unnecessary.

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Hey @justbc,

This is on the roadmap for 2024, but threshold Schnorr signatures over curve secp256k1 are a higher priority.

Checkout this section of the last Public Global R&D in December: https://youtu.be/eOIfywrN4g0?t=3619

Until then, you can create a mock canister that creates EdDSA25519 signatures with the risk that a node provider may be able to extract the key.

Here are two examples of this:

just to give you an idea.

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That’s really helpful, thanks!

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Is there a secp251k1 curve?

Or did you mean secp256k1?

Sorry, amateur crypto hobbiest :sweat_smile:

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:upside_down_face: You’re right of course. This was a typo. Fixed it! Thanks! :pray:

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Hi @justbc, as @domwoe mentioned we are now looking into extending support to threshold Schnorr signatures as well as Ed25519. Supporting Schnorr over Secp256k1 will be easier because we can reuse part of the existing IDKG protocol implemented for ECDSA. Once we have that, adding support for Ed25519 should be comparatively easy, since they are very similar to Schnorr signatures.

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I’m glad to hear this implementation is straightforward and on the roadmap.

Is this expected to be done in the next few months or is it further off?

It there a shortage of developer hours to work on this soon, I wouldn’t mind contributing, although I’ll need to get ramped up before being productive.

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