Hi everyone,

Our research at MetaMask has lead us to propose the following EIP and we would very much appreciate if the community gave us feedback such that we can come to an agreement on a standard that would be appropriate both for wallets and applications developers to guarantee cross-compatibility.

Simple Summary:

Among others cryptographic applications, scalability and privacy solutions for ethereum blockchain require that an user performs a significant amount of signing operations. It may also require her to watch some state and be ready to sign data automatically (e.g. sign a state or contest a withdraw). The way wallets currently implement accounts poses several obstacles to the development of a complete web3.0 experience both in terms of UX, security and privacy.

This proposal describes a standard and api for a new type of wallet accounts that are derived specifically for a each given application. We propose to call them app keys . They allow to isolate the accounts used for each application, thus increasing privacy. They also allow to give more control to the applications developpers over account management and signing delegation. For these app keys, wallets can have a more permissive level of security (e.g. not requesting user’s confirmation) while keeping main accounts secure. Finally wallets can also implement a different behavior such as allowing to sign transactions without broadcasting them.

This new accounts type can allow to significantly improve UX and permit new designs for applications of the crypto permissionned web.

Abstract:

In a wallet, an user often holds most of her funds in her main accounts. These accounts require a significant level of security and should not be delegated in any way, this significantly impacts the design of cryptographic applications if a user has to manually confirm every action. Also often an user uses the same accounts across apps, which is a privacy and potentially also a security issue.

We introduce here a new account type, app keys, which permits signing delegation and accounts isolation across applications for privacy and security.

In this EIP, we provide a proposal how to uniquely identify and authenticate each application, how to derive the accounts along an Hierachical Deterministic (HD) path restricted for the domain and we finally define an API for applications to derive and use these app keys. This ERC aims at finding a standard that will fit the needs of wallets and application developers while also allowing app keys to be used across wallets and yield the same accounts for the user for each application.

Elements to discuss:

The motivation of this ERC is to get feedback about the following points:

Thanks, looking forward to discuss this with the community!

Vincent