Accounts cryptography

Private Key
In IoTeX, the accounts Private Key is generated as 64 random hex characters, e.g.:
90bf89cd944df5c6d8281b132783277c1760537809c534fc54dda34c4edfb4f4
And the corresponding Public Key is derived from the private key using ECDSA with the secp256k1 curve, which is the same as Ethereum.
Given a signed message, you can recover the public key of the signing account using Ecrecover, also defined in solidity for signature verification in smart contracts.
Address Construction
An IoTeX native representation of an account address like:
 io1nyjs526mnqcsx4twa7nptkg08eclsw5c2dywp4 
can be constructed using the following steps:
1. Generate a random private key as 64 random hex characters
privKey = 
0700898c9dcae0279c88318003ee210e1ee2514121d292d2f03739498ce95f4e
2. Calculate the corresponding public key using secp256k1 elliptic curve
pubKey := keccak256k1(privKey) = 
046748ee7f4b573f1fb17517005499003385da75788b2052b18bbb05fd0dcf50597ffc54a22a02ca7343ed2654212022c1f4a0c3755dbdb81a2e70c7c0805520dc
3. Apply keccak256 hash function to the public key, excluding the first byte
hash := keccak256(pubKey[1:]) =
42a1c0796606183ccdb3d935147e805c858840099190e208d7a04a74f2a0aac8
4. Take the last 20 bytes of the hash
payload := hash[12:] =
147e805c858840099190e208d7a04a74f2a0aac8
this is the "byte representation" of the address
5. Convert the byte representation to 5-bit encoding (base32)
2, 17, 31, 8, 0, 23, 4, 5, 17, 1, 0, 0, 19, 4, 12, 16, 28, 8, 4, 13, 15, 8, 2, 10, 14, 19, 25, 10, 1, 10, 22, 8
See a go lang implementation for the 5-bit conversion implementation or a nodejs package (use toWords() to convert a bytes array into 5-bit words).
6. Apply the bech32 encoding on the 5-bit payload with the io prefix
address :=
io1bc1qz3lgqhy93pqqnyvsugyd0gz2wne2p2kght0g4r
See a go lang implementation for the bech32 encoding implementation or a nodejs package (use encode to encode 5-bit words with a prefix).

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Outline

Private Key

Address Construction

Private Key

Address Construction

1. Generate a random private key as 64 random hex characters

2. Calculate the corresponding public key using secp256k1 elliptic curve

3. Apply `keccak256` hash function to the public key, excluding the first byte

4. Take the last 20 bytes of the hash

5. Convert the byte representation to 5-bit encoding (base32)

6. Apply the bech32 encoding on the 5-bit payload with the `io` prefix