Auth

The main purpose of the @interchainjs/auth is to offer developers a way to have different wallet algorithm implementations on Blockchain, including secp256k1, ethSecp256k1, etc. All of these algorithms implementations are exposing the same Auth interface which means that Signers can just use these methods without the need to know the underlying implementation for specific algorithms as they are abstracted away.

To start, you have to make an instance of the *Auth (i.e. Secp256k1Auth) class which gives you the ability to use different algorithms out of the box.

Usually it can be instantiated from constructor or static methods.

• fromMnemonic makes an instance from a mnemonic words string. This instance can both sign.

Let's have a look at the properties and methods that Auth interface exposes and what they mean:

• algo implies the algorithm name, i.e. secp256k1, ed25519.
• getPublicKey gets the public key. This method returns the compressed or uncompressed public key according to the value of argument isCompressed.
• sign signs binary data that can be any piece of information or message that needs to be digitally signed, and returns a Signature typed object. Note: this method itself usually does not inherently involve any hash method.

It's important to note that for a specific cryptographic algorithms, the corresponding *Auth class implements Auth interface in a way that can be universally applied on different networks. That's why sign method usually don't apply any hash function to the targeted message data. Those various hashing processes will be configured in different Signers. That is:

• *Auth classes differs across algorithms but independent of networks
• *Signer classes differs across networks but independent of algorithms

See usage example.

ByteAuth vs. DocAuth

ByteAuth

ByteAuth is an interface that extends the Auth interface and represents an authentication method that can sign arbitrary bytes. It is typically used for signing arbitrary data using specific algorithms like secp256k1 or eth_secp256k1. The sign method in ByteAuth takes a Uint8Array of data and returns a signature wrapped in an ISignatureWraper.

DocAuth

DocAuth is an interface that extends the Auth interface and represents an authentication method that can sign documents using offline signers. It is a wrapper for offline signers and is usually used by signers built from offline signers. The signDoc method in DocAuth takes a document of a specific type and returns a SignDocResponse. The DocAuth interface also includes an address property that represents the address associated with the authentication method.

Auth vs. Wallet

Both Auth and Wallet are interfaces that contains sign method.

/** you can import { Auth, Wallet } from "@interchainjs/types" */
 
export interface Auth {
  ...,
  sign: (data: Uint8Array) => Signature;
}
 
export interface Wallet<Account, SignDoc> {
  ...,
  async signDirect(
    signerAddress: string,
    signDoc: CosmosDirectDoc
  ): Promise<DirectSignResponse>;
  async signAmino(
    signerAddress: string,
    signDoc: CosmosAminoDoc
  ): Promise<AminoSignResponse>;
}

As we can see above, the signing target of Wallet is can be any type (usually we set it as the sign document type) while in Auth it's limited to binary data.

For each Signer it always has a specific type of sign document type as the signing target to get signature (i.e. for AminoSigner it's StdSignDoc and for DirectSigner it's SignDoc). And for some Web3 wallet, they only expose signing methods of the sign document rather than the generalized binary data. Under this circumstance, users are still abled to construct a Signer object via the fromWallet static method. This is why Wallet interface is created.

See usage example.