I didn't mean for both of these to go into the same commit, but given how
small the ECDH code was, and the fact that no commit prior to this one will
compile (as both libsecp256k1 and rustc have changed so much), I'm letting
it slide.
There are a lot of cases in rust-bitcoin where we need a `Secp256k1`
which doesn't need any signing or verification capabilities, only
checking the validity of various objects. We can get away with a bare
context (i.e. no precomputation) which can be cheaply created on demand,
avoiding the need to pass around references to Secp256k1 objects everywhere.
API break because the following functions can now fail (given an insufficiently
capable context) and therefore now return a Result:
Secp256k1::generate_keypair
Secp256k1::sign
Secp256k1::sign_compact
The Rng was only used for key generation, and for BIP32 users not even then;
thus hauling around a Rng is a waste of space in addition to causing a
massive amount of syntactic noise. For example rust-bitcoin almost always
uses `()` as the Rng; having `Secp256k1` default to a `Secp256k1<Fortuna>`
then means even more syntactic noise, rather than less.
Now key generation functions take a Rng as a parameter, and the rest can
forget about having a Rng. This also means that the Secp256k1 context
never needs a mutable reference and can be easily put into an Arc if so
desired.
This comes with a couple bugfixes and the following API changes:
- Secp256k1::sign and ::sign_compact no longer return Result;
it is impossible to trigger their failure modes with safe
code since the `Message` and `SecretKey` types validate when
they are created.
- constants::MAX_COMPACT_SIGNATURE_SIZE loses the MAX_; signatures
are always constant size
- the Debug output for everything is now hex-encoded rather than
being a list of base-10 ints. It's just easier to read this way.
kcov v26 now reports 100% test coverage; however, this does not
guarantee that test coverage is actually complete. Patches are
always welcome for improved unit tests.
Now that you can't create secret keys by directly passing a Rng to
`SecretKey::new`, we need a way to allow user-chosed randomness.
We add it to the `Secp256k1`.
Rather than have global initialization functions, which required
expensive synchronization on the part of the Rust library,
libsecp256k1 now carries its context in thread-local data which
must be passed to every function.
What this means for the rust-secp256k1 API is:
- Most functions on `PublicKey` and `SecretKey` now require a
`Secp256k1` to be given to them.
- `Secp256k1::verify` and `::verify_raw` now take a `&self`
- `SecretKey::new` now takes a `Secp256k1` rather than a Rng; a
future commit will allow specifying the Rng in the `Secp256k1`
so that functionality is not lost.
- The FFI functions have all changed to take a context argument
- `secp256k1::init()` is gone, as is the dependency on std::sync
- There is a `ffi::Context` type which must be handled carefully
by anyone using it directly (hopefully nobody :))
Y'know, I can't for the life of me think what this was supposed to
be used for. Given that the library did not compile for several
months until last week, I assume there are no users, let alone
users of such a weird feature.
rust-secp256k1 was based off of https://github.com/sipa/secp256k1,
which has been inactive nearly as long as this repository (prior to
a couple days ago anyway). The correct repository is
https://github.com/bitcoin/secp256k1
This is a major breaking change to the library for one reason: there
are no longer any Nonce types in the safe interface. The signing functions
do not take a nonce; this is generated internally.
This also means that I was able to drop all my RFC6979 code, since
libsecp256k1 has its own implementation.
If you need to generate your own nonces, you need to create an unsafe
function of type `ffi::NonceFn`, then pass it to the appropriate
functions in the `ffi` module. There is no safe interface for doing
this, deliberately: there is basically no need to directly fiddle
with nonces ever.
I'm taking advantage of the CC0 license on any of David's code to
give me permission to do this :). Almost all of it is my code by
this point so I am also morally in the clear.
-a
Andrew Poelstra
Matt Quinn