Just amazing to read how this technology works. After reading all the responses I had to see how the whole thing works and found an interesting article. Basically, we have "asymmetric cryptography", that helps in the process of securing and signing a message.
Thanks to Ralph Merkle, Whitfield diffie, Martin hellman, these were the three great minds behind them who invented the process of asymmetric cryptography in the year 1976! It's really astounding to see how various researches in the past helped shape the bitcoin that we see today.
Asymmetric cryptography is one of the most powerful techniques in computing and a fundamental part of the security of the Internet and blockchain-type networks. Its use has allowed high levels of security where it is necessary, guaranteeing privacy and even anonymity.
What is asymmetric cryptography?As I understand from the article that I read we can use the signing process for:
- Verification of origin of funds
- Be able to make payments to a specific address safely
- As a preliminary to the configuration of multi-sig or multi-signature purses
- Be able to prove that you are the owner of an address.
I am not sure if these are the only special wallets/tools that can sign the message OR any wallet can do but from the reading:
- Bitcoin Core
- Electrum Wallet
- Trezor Wallet
- Bitcoin Signature Tool - Seems to be referred tool
- GitHub library ?
I am not so sure about the GitHub signing and how it happens but it seems we have an open source tool for signing?
@OP, I believe this article would help you a lot in understanding more about the entire process and how to work with various tools. I have just shared the chunks of article.
Even I am introducing myself to the singing so deeply for the first time, so here you go mate:
How to sign a message with your bitcoin address?Security of this system
Surely you wonder if this system is really safe and cannot be broken in some way. If that is one of your concerns, you might like to know that you have nothing to worry about: this function is secure, in fact it is highly secure.
This is possible thanks to the fact that Bitcoin uses the digital signature algorithm ECDSA to perform all these operations, and for the moment, said algorithm next to the curve secp256k1, is considered highly safe. In short, the security of both Bitcoin and this function is protected by very powerful cryptography that has not been broken at the moment. To give you an idea of its security, you should know that this process is based on a superior security than almost anyone that you use in your day to day in some processes with online banking, messaging, telephony, ...
On the other hand, and as you can see, it is a really simple process, in fact, if you know encryption and decryption systems for messages such as PGP (or GPG) you will realize that it works using the same basis of principles.
The objective of all this is to provide you with a tool to send and verify information safely and without any kind of intermediary for it. As always, Bitcoin has been targeting decentralization from its inception and features like these only attest to that effort.