libSecp256k1 over RPC

• There are hundreds if not 1000+ secp256k1 implementations available spread across various programming languages.
• The most prominent implementation of secp256k1 is bitcoin's original libsecp256k1 which is written in C lang.
• This project aims to provide the ability to work with original libsecp256k1 directly using RPC for projects that are not written in C lang.
• This project runs in a docker container (essentially as a background process) which exposes a TCP port "locally" for communications.
• Default configuration prevents any exposure to LAN/WAN.

Trust, but verify!

Everyone from GitHub community is welcome to audit the codebase.

Security Considerations

• It is quite actually the same as running Bitcoin core. So, if you have Bitcoin core installed on your server/computer, you will notice that all communication between bitcoind and its cli and qt components are in fact made using RPC over TCP. Any command sent to bitcoin-cli is actually converted to an HTTP call to bitcoind RPC server.
• Intended purpose of this project is to run locally in your system. It is NOT recommended to deploy it elsewhere and connect to it remotely. It is even highly discouraged to use it over LAN/vLAN (however any vulnerability depends on your use-case and threat model).
• Real security threat are NOT really the incoming connections from outside, but instead the real security threat is when this RPC server is deployed elsewhere and attempt to connect to it remotely. TCP by nature is not secure and data packets are visible to attackers. Run and use locally!

Before Starting

• This project runs inside a docker container. By default, all docker containers share a "bridge" network. So before starting, either:
  • Depending on your use case, include this in your existing network of other containers (i.e. Docker Compose) so only these containers will be able to communicate with this project, OR:
  • Create a new isolated bridge network just for this container, AND/OR:
  • Expose RPC server port 27271 but bind it with localhost (-p 127.0.0.1:6000:27271) so no outside connections can approach this container, apart from local ones accessible on port 6000 (example).

Use Cases

• Educational purposes
• Test vectors / cross-examinations

Building

To pull the latest release from Docker Hub repo:

docker pull furqansiddiqui/secp256k1-rpc:latest

OR, to build from source code:

docker build -t furqansiddiqui/secp256k1-rpc .

Start JSON RPC server

Actual command to run the container should vary according to your own implementation and use case. An example command that exposes port 27270 locally, while container is given with an isolated docker network:

Creating a separate docker network:

docker network create -d bridge secp256k1-isolated-network

Run the Secp256k1-RPC server:

docker run -d -p 127.0.0.1:27270:27271 --network secp256k1-isolated-network --name secp256k1-rpc furqansiddiqui/secp256k1-rpc