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DID Controller Keypair

Creating a keypair used to control a DID method

Create a new DID controller keypair using openssl. In this example, we use Ed25519, but other algorithms are also supported (see specification).

Make sure you have openssl & GNU coreutils installed and avalible on command line (e.g. brew install coreutils on macOS)

openssl genpkey -algorithm ed25519 -outform DER >privkey
openssl pkey -in privkey -pubout -out pubkey -inform DER -outform DER

This creates two files, pubkey and privkey.

Depending on the method, the public key is encoded in either

  • Base64 URL (base64url)

  • Base58 (base58)

FAQ

How do I install base58 app (on macOS).

There are two ways to install it. If one app doesn't work, try the other one.

# using howbrew
brew install base58
# using cargo (requires rust tooling to be installed)
cargo install bs58-cli
## hint latter works best by symlinking: ln -s source_path target_in_path/base58

How to install & use openssl 3 (on macOS).

Some newer features are only available in the latest version of openssl, version 3. To install it

It is not automatically added to the path as macOS uses LibreSSL. Therefore you can use the absolute path.

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