c068f04a82
Replaced SigningKey with PrivateKey Replaced all occurences of signing key with private key Replaced all occurences of verifying key with public key
1.3 KiB
Cryptography
The section documents the cryptographic algorithms and Python implementations that we use.
Before hashing or computing the signature of a JSON document, we serialize it as described in the section on JSON serialization.
Hashes
We compute hashes using the SHA3-256 algorithm and pysha3 as the Python implementation. We store the hex-encoded hash in the database. For example:
import hashlib
# monkey patch hashlib with sha3 functions
import sha3
data = "message"
tx_hash = hashlib.sha3_256(data).hexdigest()
Signature Algorithm and Keys
BigchainDB uses the Ed25519 public-key signature system for generating its public/private key pairs. Ed25519 is an instance of the Edwards-curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA). As of April 2016, EdDSA was in "Internet-Draft" status with the IETF but was already widely used.
BigchainDB uses the the ed25519 Python package, overloaded by the cryptoconditions library.
All keys are represented with the base58 encoding by default.