Is there a practical way (preferrably OSS library or implementation) to verify Ed25519 signatures in Solidity (compiled for and run on the EVM), in smart contracts?
Update: I've created EIP665
There's no native functions that provide ed25519 cryptographic operations.
Doing it in the EVM would require a substantial amount of processing, and being that:
Fast single-signature verification. The software takes only 273,364 cycles to verify a signature on Intel's widely deployed Nehalem/Westmere lines of CPUs
I'm fairly certain that you'd quickly use up a lot of gas trying, most likely more than the maximum allowed.
In order to accomplish this, you'd need to start an EIP request, and convince the community that there's a valid and compelling use-case for implementing native signature verification in the server itself.
Specifically you'd want to explain in the EIP why the existing ecsign and ecrecover (ECDSA) routines aren't adequately suitable.
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2The link @benjaminion posted is a proposal for EIP 665, which hasn't been accepted yet. Seems to have stalled at December '17. Might be time to try and drum up some community support for it.– norgannaMar 20 '18 at 14:59
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It also needs more content -- current description is quite short. Mar 20 '18 at 20:38
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Thanks for the information! So even though it'll be slow/expensive, there is no known implementation in mere Solidity? rgd the Q of why: because ECDSA is inferior to Ed25519. From the crypto/algo (NIST/NSA may have deliberately designed for compromised curves) and technically (available implementations .. eg NaCl is side-channel resistant).– oberstetMar 22 '18 at 11:51
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Yeah, but Ethereum is ECDSA based at a foundational level anyhow, so if it's compromised, the entire platform is suspect. I'm not arguing mind you, as I refuse to use ECDSA for any SSH and TLS keys I generate, but as an argument for an EIP, I doubt "cause NSA can crack it" will be sufficient as if NSA can crack it, they can bring the entire platform to it's knees.– norgannaMar 23 '18 at 0:00
