Introduction
In episode 13, Bill discussed the idea of adding salt to a hash and how modern crypto-currency blockchains use it to better interpret requests sent to nodes. He continued by defining a function called stamp that embeds a salt within a hash. While writing the function, Bill stated that he would use keccak256 as it’s the same algorithm used by Ethereum to generate hash values. Bill will use the APIs provided with Go Ethereum to generate a keccak256 hash. He plans on reusing the stamp function in the future to digitally sign transactions performed on his blockchain.
In this video, Bill begins to write code that will generate a digital signature of a transaction. The objective he expects to attain with this task is the ability for his nodes to reliably determine the origin of a transaction. The first step he’ll take is to write a function to generate a signature that accepts two parameters: the object to be signed and the private key to sign the data with. While implementing this function, Bill demonstrates how a blockchain node extrapolates the public key from a digital signature. Watch and learn how to create your own private ECDSA keys and the steps taken to digitally sign data with Go.
Things you will learn in this video
- The ideal way to store a private key.
- The byte segments of an Ethereum digital signature.
- How Ethereum decodes a digital signature.
- How to calculate a public key with the Go Ethereum library.
- How to load a private key from disk and use it to sign an object.
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