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Bitcoin Dev Archive 2014

standardize on bitcoin signed ecies ?

2 messages, 27 Aug 2014. Started by Mem Wallet.

Mem Wallet, Greg Maxwell

Permalink Original thread on gnusha.org

Mem Wallet permalink original

Does anyone see a value in a standardized PGP-style message, which would allow someone performing a bitcoin transaction to send signed encrypted messages using only public and private bitcoin keys ?

I'd like to propose a signed encrypted message protocol, in case someone see's value in encoding such a thing into a BIP.

Greg Maxwell in reply to Mem Wallet permalink original

On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 5:57 PM, Mem Wallet <memwallet.info@gmail•com> wrote:

Quoted text (8 lines)
>
> Does anyone see a value in a standardized PGP-style message,
> which would allow someone performing a bitcoin transaction to
> send signed encrypted messages using only public and private
> bitcoin keys ?
>
> I'd like to propose a signed encrypted message protocol, in case
> someone see's value in encoding such a thing into a BIP.

Using the same keys for signing and encryption is generally considered a bad practice, for a number of reasons.

If the keys aren't the same, there is much less reason to use something specific to Bitcoin.

Getting all the details right in an encryption implementation is very difficulty, previously published efforts in Bitcoin software have been _severely_ flawed and insecure. I am not confident that an effort right now would receive adequate review.