base58

base58 is a fast, cryptographically secure, purely Go implementation of Base58 with resistance to side-channel attacks.

Security

This package provides constant-time functions (base58.Encode and base58.Decode) that convert from/to Base58 strings, which offers cryptographic security that resists side-channel attacks such as timing attacks. As far as the author knows, there are no libraries so far that provide constant-time functions. The author checked the following libraries so far:

• https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd/tree/13152b35e191385a874294a9dbc902e48b1d71b0/btcutil/base58
• https://github.com/itchyny/base58-go/blob/v0.2.1/base58.go
• https://github.com/trezor/trezor-crypto/blob/915b3dbbbf58c262865647728a3463b8785fc965/base58.c#L149
• https://github.com/akamensky/base58/blob/71d82f380f85866825434c181ba341ec09cba13b/base58.go
• https://github.com/mr-tron/base58/blob/v1.2.0/base58.go

Benchmarks

This package provides variable-time functions (base58.VartimeEncode and base58.VartimeDecode) as well.

$ go test -bench=5K .
goos: darwin
goarch: arm64
pkg: github.com/koba-e964/base58-go
BenchmarkDecode_ConstantTime_5K-8            660           1772633 ns/op           3.91 MB/s        5376 B/op          1 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecode_VariableTime_5K-8           8433            134081 ns/op          51.63 MB/s      338044 B/op        126 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncode_ConstantTime_5K-8            409           2905121 ns/op           1.72 MB/s       12288 B/op          2 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncode_VariableTime_5K-8            982           1216755 ns/op           4.11 MB/s       24664 B/op        686 allocs/op
PASS
ok      github.com/koba-e964/base58-go  5.459s

The performance of base58.VartimeEncode and base58.VartimeDecode is comparable to that of github.com/btcsuite/btcd/btcutil/base58:

$ go test -bench=5K .
goos: darwin
goarch: arm64
pkg: github.com/btcsuite/btcd/btcutil/base58
BenchmarkBase58Encode_5K-8           974           1222350 ns/op           4.09 MB/s
BenchmarkBase58Decode_5K-8          8229            131085 ns/op          52.10 MB/s
PASS
ok      github.com/btcsuite/btcd/btcutil/base58 3.228s
$ git log --max-count=1
commit 13152b35e191385a874294a9dbc902e48b1d71b0 (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD)
Merge: 8e53942b e307ad12
Author: Olaoluwa Osuntokun <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Jan 23 20:25:55 2024 -0800

    Merge pull request #2089 from kcalvinalvin/2024-01-03-add-last-flush-time-on-initconsistentstate
    
    blockchain: set the lastflushtime when setting the lastflushhash
$ go version
go version go1.22.0 darwin/arm64

Docs

https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/koba-e964/base58-go