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Message signing

Message Signing

When interacting with the Stacks blockchain, much of the activity we do as users is considered "signing" messages. What this means is that we are using our private keys to verify that some bits of data are really something we want to do. This is most often in the form of signing and then broadcasting transactions. However, there are many use cases for which we'd want to sign something that is not a transaction. Taken from the SIP-018 introduction:

Digital signatures are at the heart of blockchains. They allow users to transfer assets, invoke smart contracts and more, without a designated trusted third party. To perform these actions, a user signs a transaction and broadcasts it to the network.

However, there are situations in which it is desirable to produce signed messages that are not transactions:

  • prove to an external application or entity that a user is in control of an address;
  • authorize an action to be performed by a smart contract at a later stage (like a meta transaction, see below);
  • participate in an off-chain mechanism that is later settled on-chain (like a subnet).

It is important that signed messages are understandable for humans. For transactions, this is obvious: wallet applications display whom is receiving how many tokens of what kind. Likewise, the input parameters, function name, and target contract of contract calls are properly listed. Signed messages that are not transactions should be no different.

You can read more about the standard here.

Typically a Stacks-based app will not be responsible for any private keys, but instead something like the Hiro Web Wallet or Xverse will be the application that ends up signing messages.

SIP-018 message signing

There are two main types of messages that you can sign:

Standard messages