wesl-ee / btc_ecdsa_secp256k1

Showcase ECDSA using secp256k1 from scratch

ECDSA Secp256k1 (Golang)

Illustrative Go code showcasing the generation of ECDSA signatures and verification of those signatures using the secp256k1 curve.

Executive Summary

ECDSA is a public-key cryptosystem that leverages elliptic curves and the associated discrete logarithm problem to allow parties to sign messages and validate that those messages originated only from the sender. It is used in public blockchains, notably in the Bitcoin ledger, to validate that only the proper owner of some UTXOs can spend those funds. Bitcoin uses the secp256k1 curve with the typical parameters.

This repository demonstrates how one could build the ECDSA from scratch and uses only two libraries for convenience:

• holiman/uint256 for handling 256-bit integers, and
• crypto/sha256 for hashing messages

Testing

The code comes with a small number of tests which validate the output based on well-known test vectors for ECDSA secp256k1. These tests are run by:

go test -v