This library is intended to be the highest quality publicly available library for cryptography on the secp256k1 curve. However, the primary focus of its development has been for usage in the Bitcoin system and usage unlike Bitcoin's may be less well tested, verified, or suffer from a less well thought out interface. Correct usage requires some care and consideration that the library is fit for your application's purpose.
* This is an experimental feature that has not received enough scrutiny to satisfy the standard of quality of this library but is made available for testing and review by the community.
* Modular inverses (both field elements and scalars) based on [safegcd](https://gcd.cr.yp.to/index.html) with some modifications, and a variable-time variant (by Peter Dettman).
* Intended to be completely free of timing sidechannels for secret-key operations (on reasonable hardware/toolchains)
* Access the table with branch-free conditional moves so memory access is uniform.
* No data-dependent branches
* Optional runtime blinding which attempts to frustrate differential power analysis.
* The precomputed tables add and eventually subtract points for which no known scalar (secret key) is known, preventing even an attacker with control over the secret key used to control the data internally.
To compile optional modules (such as Schnorr signatures), you need to run `./configure` with additional flags (such as `--enable-module-schnorrsig`). Run `./configure --help` to see the full list of available flags.
To maintain a pristine source tree, CMake encourages to perform an out-of-source build by using a separate dedicated build tree.
### Building on POSIX systems
$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make
$ make check # run the test suite
$ sudo make install # optional
To compile optional modules (such as Schnorr signatures), you need to run `cmake` with additional flags (such as `-DSECP256K1_ENABLE_MODULE_SCHNORRSIG=ON`). Run `cmake .. -LH` to see the full list of available flags.
### Cross compiling
To alleviate issues with cross compiling, preconfigured toolchain files are available in the `cmake` directory.
To cross compile for Android with [NDK](https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/cmake) (using NDK's toolchain file, and assuming the `ANDROID_NDK_ROOT` environment variable has been set):
To build on Windows with Visual Studio, a proper [generator](https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/manual/cmake-generators.7.html#visual-studio-generators) must be specified for a new build tree.
The following example assumes using of Visual Studio 2022 and CMake v3.21+.
In "Developer Command Prompt for VS 2022":
>cmake -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64 -S . -B build
If configured with `--enable-benchmark` (which is the default), binaries for benchmarking the libsecp256k1 functions will be present in the root directory after the build.
To print the benchmark result to the command line:
$ ./bench_name
To create a CSV file for the benchmark result :
$ ./bench_name | sed '2d;s/ \{1,\}//g' > bench_name.csv
