Revisit how IPFS imports pre-made keys.

[nlko]

Hello,

I tried to follow the example provided in the documentation to import a key from a pem file and here is the result.

$ curl -X POST -F [email protected] "http://127.0.0.1:5001/api/v0/key/import?arg=test&ipns-base=base36"
{"Message":"proto: illegal wireType 7","Code":0,"Type":"error"}

I'm using ipfs version is 0.8.0

The HTTP error message looks like a protobuf error. Maybe my key is not formatted correctly.

The command I used to generate the key was ssh-keygen -t rsa which end up as a text file (and not a protobuf).

What is the required format for the keys and how to create them?

Also, the documentation says that :

• "Argument key is of file type": Does it means that I should rather use -F key[email protected] instead ?
• "several files can be provided": Is it for importing several keys at the same time ? In that case how can I pass the name of each key ?

Thanks in advance for helping I'm trying to wrap my head around this for several hours now. I'm quite new to multipart/form-data so maybe this is why I'd wish also the documentation to be clearer.

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[johnnymatthews]

Sorry for the delay in getting to this issue. I just tried to import keys myself using the info in the docs, and it seems that they're not playing ball. I got a similar wireType error. I'll pull in an engineer from the Go-IPFS team to see if they can weigh in on what's going on here.

[aschmahmann]

IPNS keys are libp2p keys which are defined in this spec (https://github.com/libp2p/specs/blob/master/peer-ids/peer-ids.md#keys). The short version is that the key is wrapped in a protobuf that says what type it is.

If you construct the same protobuf format you'll be good to go (it's also a file, not an argument).

If you were going to construct the key file in Go you could use the tools in https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p-core/tree/master/crypto.

There's also some discussion of users constructing the key file using Python and Javascript in https://discuss.ipfs.io/t/how-can-i-set-my-own-ed25519-key/9183

[nlko]

Hello,

Sorry for the late reply. Thank you for your explanation, I was able to format the protobuf message. Unfortunately the import fails because the key has the wrong format (I tried to generate the key from several js librairies) I don't have time these days to search. I will try again later.

I find it sad that this process is not more straightforward (for the js/ts ecosystem). I think this is key for creating applications above IPFS and managing decentralized identification (DID). Maybe next time I try, someone will have provided an example (It certainly would help for choosing the right library for generating a key to the right format and how to encode it in the fileld of pb message).