Is there a deterministic private-public keypair generator without the BIP32 private key revealing issue?

This is accounted for within the BIP32 specification, they are called 'hardened' keys. Hardened child private keys are derived from the parents' private keys, and revealing the hardened child private keys does not reveal the parents' private key.

Child indices 0...2^31-1 are reserved for regular keys (that have the problem you describe), and child indices 2^31...2^32-1 are reserved for hardened private keys.

Notation for a standard child:

m/0

Notation for a hardened child:

m/0'
m/0h

morsecoder

Posted 2015-07-29T17:41:23.557

Reputation: 12 624

This makes generating master public key useless as it is unable to generate public keys in children, which is something I want to have. – Pavol Rusnak – 2015-07-29T18:41:06.393

@PavolRusnak, you can't have it both ways, unfortunately. Either the parent-pub and child-pub are related by an ECC key for which the private key is known, or it's not. But you can use both hardened and standard keys in the same tree structure! Best practice is to use Hardened keys for upper levels of the tree, and non-hardened only for the lower levels.

– morsecoder – 2015-07-29T19:00:50.267

See Bip44: you can use m / 44'/0'/0'/0/k, where k is your key. Losing private key k together with parent/k would not reveal the whole chain because you do : m/44'/0'/0>'</0/0 (mint the >.<) – Jonas Schnelli – 2015-07-30T06:10:31.993

Is there a deterministic private-public keypair generator without the BIP32 private key revealing issue?

Answers