Skip to content
CCPEDIAby Unity Nodes
Discussions/App Development/Private Key Storage in CantonForum ↗

Private Key Storage in Canton

App Development3 posts547 views2 likesLast activity Mar 2023
CO
corey.todaroOP
Apr 2021

I understand that Canton uses private keys for its identity management service.

From the documentation on the implementation of the Identity Management Service, it appears there are a number of Identity Stores - but these are identity related and timestamped transactional stores.
But it’s unclear to me where and who stores a party’s private key.

Is a party’s key storage and management a component of a participant node? Is it external?

Separately, does Canton’s identity management service interact with Daml’s Ledger API auth functionality? If so, how?

DA
davidpadbury
Apr 2021

Hi @corey.todaro ,

Within canton it’s the participant that will have a private key not the party. This key will be used for all parties the participant hosts. In our default setup these keys will just be stored in the database. We will potentially support storing keys elsewhere in the future (likely HSMs).

These keys are not used within the leger-api authentication. You can find some details on how that is configured within canton for participants and certificate usage here: Static Conf - JWT Authorization.

David.

IA
Ianw1
Mar 2023

To update, Canton now supports use of HSM, see Security — Daml SDK 2.6.0 documentation.

← Back to Discussions