Trait Signature

pub trait Signature:
    AsRef<[u8]>
    + Debug
    + Sized {
    // Required method
    fn from_bytes(bytes: &[u8]) -> Result<Self, Error>;

    // Provided method
    fn as_bytes(&self) -> &[u8]  { ... }
}

Trait impl’d by concrete types that represent digital signatures.

Signature types must (as mandated by the AsRef<[u8]> bound) be a thin wrapper around the “bag-of-bytes” serialized form of a signature which can be directly parsed from or written to the “wire”.

Inspiration for this approach comes from the Ed25519 signature system, which adopted it based on the observation that past signature systems were not prescriptive about how signatures should be represented on-the-wire, and that lead to a proliferation of different wire formats and confusion about which ones should be used.

The Signature trait aims to provide similar simplicity by minimizing the number of steps involved to obtain a serializable signature and ideally ensuring there is one signature type for any given signature system shared by all “provider” crates.

For signature systems which require a more advanced internal representation (e.g. involving decoded scalars or decompressed elliptic curve points) it’s recommended that “provider” libraries maintain their own internal signature type and use From bounds to provide automatic conversions.

Required Methods

fn from_bytes(bytes: &[u8]) -> Result<Self, Error>

Parse a signature from its byte representation

Provided Methods

fn as_bytes(&self) -> &[u8]

Borrow a byte slice representing the serialized form of this signature

Dyn Compatibility

This trait is not dyn compatible.

In older versions of Rust, dyn compatibility was called "object safety", so this trait is not object safe.

Implementors