1 if sigin was not normalized, 0 if it already was. Args: ctx: a secp256k1 context object Out: sigout: a pointer to a signature to fill with the normalized form, or copy if the input was already normalized. (can be NULL if you're only interested in whether the input was already normalized). In: sigin: a pointer to a signature to check/normalize (can be identical to sigout)
With ECDSA a third-party can forge a second distinct signature of the same message, given a single initial signature, but without knowing the key. This is done by negating the S value modulo the order of the curve, 'flipping' the sign of the random point R which is not included in the signature.
Forgery of the same message isn't universally problematic, but in systems where message malleability or uniqueness of signatures is important this can cause issues. This forgery can be blocked by all verifiers forcing signers to use a normalized form.
The lower-S form reduces the size of signatures slightly on average when variable length encodings (such as DER) are used and is cheap to verify, making it a good choice. Security of always using lower-S is assured because anyone can trivially modify a signature after the fact to enforce this property anyway.
The lower S value is always between 0x1 and 0x7FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF5D576E7357A4501DDFE92F46681B20A0, inclusive.
No other forms of ECDSA malleability are known and none seem likely, but there is no formal proof that ECDSA, even with this additional restriction, is free of other malleability. Commonly used serialization schemes will also accept various non-unique encodings, so care should be taken when this property is required for an application.
The secp256k1_ecdsa_sign function will by default create signatures in the lower-S form, and secp256k1_ecdsa_verify will not accept others. In case signatures come from a system that cannot enforce this property, secp256k1_ecdsa_signature_normalize must be called before verification.
Convert a signature to a normalized lower-S form.