Quai Ristretto Implementation

QIP Discussion
1

Quai Network: Implementation of Ristretto Signing Curve

Overview

Ristretto is a prime order elliptic curve technique ensuring non-malleable encodings. The integration of Ristretto will enhance the Quai Network’s security, speed, and capability.

Benefits:

  • Enhanced Security: Prevent various elliptic curve related attacks.
  • High-Speed Transactions: Utilize the efficiency of Curve25519 in combination with Ristretto.
  • Unique Encodings: Ensure non-malleability across cryptographic operations.
  • Privacy Potential: Enables the introduction of advanced privacy-preserving protocols like Confidential Transactions or the ZK-STARKs.
  • Community Support: Rely on a well-researched and widely adopted cryptographic foundation.

Curve25519 and secp256k1 (current Quai curve) are two different elliptic curves used in public-key cryptography.

Definition and Shape:

  • Curve25519: It’s defined over the prime field 2^255 - 19 and uses Montgomery form. Its equation is (y^2 = x^3 + 486662x^2 + x).
  • secp256k1: It’s defined over the prime field 2^256 - 2^32 - 977 and uses short Weierstrass form. Its equation is (y^2 = x^3 + 7).

Implementations

  1. ristretto255
  1. ChainSafe implementation of go-schnorrkel
  1. go-ristretto

Questions

  1. Do we want to have a prefix on public to an address as encoded base58? (Polkadot does this)
  • a modification of Base-58-check from Bitcoin with some minor changes. Notably, the format contains an address type prefix that identifies an address belonging to a specific network. For example: Polkadot addresses always start with the number 1.
  1. How do we want to convert a pubkey to an address?
  2. How do we define the mapping? Like this? https://github.com/paritytech/ss58-registry/blob/main/ss58-registry.json
  3. Are we okay with putting public keys in the tx data themselves?
  4. Do we even want to support secp256k at all?
  5. Do we want to have a SigningContext?
  6. Do we want to utilize Schnorr Signature Aggregation?

References

Polkadot Accounts In-Depth

2

Regarding the question about generating addresses prefixes that identify the network, this is a very nice tool to visualize how bitcoin implements it (from the private key up to the b58 address):

3

Nice, I’ve been leaning towards the idea of b58 encoding to derive shard addresses. This is helpful to see.

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