ABablankst·Mar 1, 2018
I'm on the engineering team at Blockstack, and wrote the client-side encryption functions used by applications.
I totally agree with the idea that if software uses encryption, it should be documented, open-source, and ideally use a standard encryption protocol. Being able to say "this is exactly how encryption works" in a system is important, and I'm glad you're asking these questions.
Encryption in Blockstack apps is performed client-side via library calls in blockstack.js (our javascript library). The encryption routines are implemented here [1], and implement ECIES, using the user's application-specific private key. That private key is passed to an application during the application authentication process [2]. All a blockstack application has to do is pass { "encrypt": true } in the storage routines, and this is invoked.
We definitely
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would like to provide better documentation and messaging around how applications engage and use our client libraries -- and documenting our encryption routines is part of that. However, in the meantime, you can feel free to check out or codebase (it's all open source), and we'd always welcome any kind of feedback!
[1] https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack.js/blob/master/src/...
[2] https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack.js/blob/feature/aut...