These functions are intended for compatibility with legacy software,
and are not normally needed in new secp256k1 applications.
They also do not obeying any particular standard (and likely cannot
without without undermining their compatibility), and so are a
better fit for contrib.
ECDSA signature verification now requires normalized signatures (with S in the
lower half of the range). In case the input cannot be guaranteed to provide this,
a new function secp256k1_ecdsa_signature_normalize is provided to preprocess it.
There are now 2 encoding formats supported: 64-byte "compact" and DER.
The latter is strict: the data has to be exact DER, though the values
inside don't need to be valid.
The use of static makes this somewhat redundant currently, though if
we later have multiple compilation units it will be needed.
This also sets the dllexport needed for shared libraries on win32.
Right now `secp256k1_ec_pubkey_decompress` takes an in/out pointer to
a public key and replaces the input key with its decompressed variant.
This forces users who store compressed keys in small (<65 byte) fixed
size buffers (for example, the Rust bindings do this) to explicitly
and wastefully copy their key to a larger buffer.
[API BREAK]
This computes (n-b)G + bG with random value b, in place of nG in
ecmult_gen() for signing.
This is intended to reduce exposure to potential power/EMI sidechannels
during signing and pubkey generation by blinding the secret value with
another value which is hopefully unknown to the attacker.
It may not be very helpful if the attacker is able to observe the setup
or if even the scalar addition has an unacceptable leak, but it has low
overhead in any case and the security should be purely additive on top
of the existing defenses against sidechannels.
GCC (and clang) supports extensions to annotate functions so that their
results must be used and so that their arguments can't be statically
provable to be null. If a caller violates these requirements they
get a warning, so this helps them write correct code.
I deployed this in libopus a couple years ago with good success, and
the implementation here is basically copied straight from that.
One consideration is that the non-null annotation teaches the optimizer
and will actually compile out runtime non-nullness checks as dead-code.
Since this is usually not whats wanted, the non-null annotations are
disabled when compiling the library itself.
The commit also removes some dead inclusions of assert.h and introduces
compatibility macros for restrict and inline in preparation for some
portability improvements.
Pieter Wuille
Rusty Russell
Gregory Maxwell
Jonas Schnelli
Gustav Simonsson
Luke Dashjr
Andrew Poelstra
Thomas Kerin
Daniel Cousens
HaltingState
Pieter Wuille