CW81: Signature Verification

With the adoption of smart contract based accounts comes the need to reliably communicate with them. That requires establishing ways to reliably retrieve certain pieces of information that was trivial to get from users using normal cryptographic pair based accounts

This standard touches on the problem and proposes a standard way to verify that a signature belongs to a contract. Normally users would sign a message with their private keys, but since they are to be secret they can't be securely stored inside storage of a contract on most chains and therefore used for signing.

For that reason, the logic for saying that the signature is valid depends on the internal implementation of a contract. It can check validity based on input from an owner, use any key curve and signature schema, rely on oauth token verification and so on.

Whatever the logic is we need primitives to verifyably query the results and that's the only thing that the standard is covering.

Queries

All CW81-compliant contracts must add the following query variants to their QueryMsg:s and return the corresponding responses:

pub enum QueryMsg {
    ...

    #[returns(ValidSignatureResponse)]
    ValidSignature {
        data: Binary,
        signature: Binary,
        payload: Option<Binary>
    },

    #[returns(ValidSignaturesResponse)]
    ValidSignatures {
        data: Vec<Binary>,
        signatures: Vec<Binary>,
        payload: Option<Binary>
    }

    ...
}

ValidSignature

Used to verify one message and its corresponding signature. Useful in atomic scenarios where a batch of data/transactions is combined together and treated as the same unit with one signature.

Fields

data that can include any transactional data, cosmos messages, arbitrary text, cryptographic digest or anything else. Unlike ERC-1271 the standard doesn't enforce the input to be pre-hashed but allows it. CosmWasm environment is more optimized for binary inputs and doesn't have as significant performance bottlenecks.

signature stands for signed bytes of the data field and doesn't enforce any conditions

payload is an optional payload used for passing additional info to the contract. It can be used to pass necessary data like a list of public keys for a multisign contract but also meta information for complex contracts e.g. what signature schema to use, hashing algorithm to select or whether data had been pre-hashed already.

Returns

struct ValidSignatureResponse {
  pub is_valid: bool
}

ERC-1271 introduces a MAGICVALUE as a return type instead of a boolean in order to have stricter and simpler verification of a signature. We can follow the same rationale, but instead of arbitrary bytes we can follow the existing conventions and return a struct

ValidSignatures

In case of the need to verify multiple signatures at the same time, we can reduce the number of RPC requests by allowing them to be batched inside one QueryMsg. Some APIs already have methods for batch verification such as deps.api.ed25519_batch_verifyin std/crypto library

A great example use-case would be is situation where a querier is satisfied with one of the messages being invalid and can proceed with the rest

Fields

data has identical meaning behind it except for including a list (vector) of messages, the signature of which we are checking

signatures contains a list of signatures for each message in the data list. Must have the same length.

payload field is identical.

Technically doesn't need a different schema, but semantically works better this way. Since we use Binary (bytes) we even can use one field and serialize it to anything we need, but that doesn't provide additional intuitional utilities

Returns

struct ValidSignaturesResponse {
  pub are_valid: Vec<bool>
}

are_valid is a list of booleans that must be of the same length with data and signatures lists. It tells whether an individual signature for a corresponsing message was valid.

Usage

A contract that wishes to follow the standard must add the variants described above to their query messages. This package exposes a helper macro attribute valid_signature_query that injects it automatically:

#[valid_signature_query] // <- Must be before #[cw_serde]
#[cw_serde]
#[derive(QueryResponses)]
enum QueryMsg {}

This will make it equivavlent to

#[cw_serde]
#[derive(QueryResponses)]
enum QueryMsg {
    #[returns(ValidSignatureResponse)]
    ValidSignature {
        data: Binary,
        signature: Binary,
        payload: Option<Binary>
    },

    #[returns(ValidSignaturesResponse)]
    ValidSignatures {
        data: Vec<Binary>,
        signatures: Vec<Binary>,
        payload: Option<Binary>
    }
}

Note: cosmwasm_stdmust be imported for definition of Binary

Examples

Example contracts can be found in this repository and are prefixed with cw81-