Public key from private key generation problem

Question

I met some problems, when I was trying to write function able to create Bitcoin public key from private key. I was using the tutorial: http://procbits.com/2013/08/27/generating-a-bitcoin-address-with-javascript ---> "Public key" part is most important.

Part of my code looks like this:

public String generatePublicKey(String privateKey)
{
    BigInteger privKey = new BigInteger(privateKey,16);
    X9ECParameters ecp = SECNamedCurves.getByName("secp256k1");
    ECPoint curvePt = ecp.getG().multiply(privKey);
    BigInteger x = curvePt.getXCoord().toBigInteger();
    BigInteger y = curvePt.getYCoord().toBigInteger();
    byte[] xBytes = this.removeSignByte(x.toByteArray());
    byte[] yBytes = this.removeSignByte(y.toByteArray());
    byte[] pubKeyBytes = new byte[65];
    pubKeyBytes[0] = new Byte("04");
    System.arraycopy(xBytes,0, pubKeyBytes, 1, xBytes.length);
    System.arraycopy(yBytes, 0, pubKeyBytes, 33, yBytes.length);
    return this.bytesToHex(pubKeyBytes);}

There are also two functions:

final protected static char[] hexArray = "0123456789ABCDEF".toCharArray();
public String bytesToHex(byte[] bytes) {
    char[] hexChars = new char[bytes.length * 2];
    int v;
    for ( int j = 0; j < bytes.length; j++ ) {
        v = bytes[j] & 0xFF;
        hexChars[j * 2] = hexArray[v >>> 4];
        hexChars[j * 2 + 1] = hexArray[v & 0x0F];
    }
    return new String(hexChars);
}

private byte[] removeSignByte(byte[] arr)
{
    if(arr.length==33)
    {
        byte[] newArr = new byte[32];
        System.arraycopy(arr, 1, newArr, 0, newArr.length);
        return newArr;
    }
    return arr;
}

However I used bytesToHex() earlier and there weren't any problems. So the thing is that generatePublicKey() does not work properly. I tried to insert private key known from bitcoin wiki:

18E14A7B6A307F426A94F8114701E7C8E774E7F9A47E2C2035DB29A206321725

(from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Technical_background_of_version_1_Bitcoin_addresses)

It should create long public key (even before all hashing) - step 2 on wiki:

0450863AD64A87AE8A2FE83C1AF1A8403CB53F53E486D8511DAD8A04887E5B23522CD470243453A299FA9E77237716103ABC11A1DF38855ED6F2EE187E9C582BA6

Unfortunately the answer is wrong. Could you Guys look at this and point my mistakes?

Ofc, programming language is Java and cryptographic provider was Bouncy Castle.

EDIT: I accidentally solved my problem. When I was writing this function, Eclipse told me function getX() (and getY()) is depracated. So I used getXCoord(), because I thought its result is the same. In feeling hopeless I used getX() instead getXCoord() and whole function magically worked!

What's the difference between getX() and getXCoord() ?

For the difference between getX() and getXCoord(), you could look at the source. The difference seems to be "normalization", whatever that may be. — Nate Eldredge, Jan 13 '14 at 04:14
You should really say in the first few sentences of your question what language you are writing your code in, and what libraries you are using to do the ECDSA. — David Grayson, Mar 07 '15 at 16:38

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 27 '14 at 15:40

0

I accidentally solved my problem. When I was writing this function, Eclipse told me function getX() (and getY()) is depracated. So I used getXCoord(), because I thought its result is the same. In feeling hopeless I used getX() instead getXCoord() and whole function magically worked!

What's the difference between getX() and getXCoord() ?

answered Jan 27 '14 at 15:40

Matthew

19
1
4

The last question would likely get a good answer at stackoverflow. – MCCCS Apr 16 '18 at 04:18

Public key from private key generation problem

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