Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Formats of PublicKey in Eliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)

In ECC public key is a point on curve with coordinates (x,y)

In uncompressed format it is 65 bytes : [0x04] [32 bytes of X] [32 bytes of Y]

But as long as X can be delivered from Y, you can omit Y. It is called 'compressed format':

[02 if Y is even | 03 if Y is odd] [32 bytes of X]

Total 33 bytes long.

If key is only  32 bytes long -- then it is just point X. If you'll add  02 or 03 in front then you'll get  compressed format - which can be used in different Crypto APIs.

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