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Creating a Scrypt Based KeyStore with Nethereum

This article explains how to create a keystore file using Nethereum.

Note

You also have the possibility to run similar code directly in your browser by using Nethereum’s playground at the following link: Key Store: Create Scrypt based KeyStore using custom params

Definition: A keystore is a JSON-encoded file that contains a single (randomly generated) private key, encrypted by a passphrase for extra security (using https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Web3-Secret-Storage-Definition#scrypt). Keystores are a standard way to store private keys locally to let clients such as Geth handle privateKey/signin for you. Nethereum offers a dedicated ‘keystore’ service to facilitate the creation and management of keystore files.

Required assemblies:

using System;
using System.Text;
using Nethereum.Hex.HexConvertors.Extensions;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Nethereum.Web3;
using Nethereum.KeyStore.Model;

1- Creating a Keystore File:

We first need to create an instance of KeyStoreScryptService:

var keyStoreService = new Nethereum.KeyStore.KeyStoreScryptService();
Then prepare the required parameters to encrypt our file using scrypt
var scryptParams = new ScryptParams {Dklen = 32, N = 262144, R = 1, P = 8};
The EthEcKey function generates an Ethereum compliant privateKey:

var ecKey = Nethereum.Signer.EthECKey.GenerateKey();
The last element that we need to generate our file is a password:

var password = "testPassword";
We can finally encrypt and serialize using our custom scrypt params:

var keyStore = keyStoreService.EncryptAndGenerateKeyStore(password, ecKey.GetPrivateKeyAsBytes(), ecKey.GetPublicAddress(), scryptParams);
var json = keyStoreService.SerializeKeyStoreToJson(keyStore);

2- Decrypting a key

Extracting our private key is achieved using DecryptKeyStoreFromJson

var key = keyStoreService.DecryptKeyStoreFromJson(password, json);

Questions or feedback? You can discuss issues and obtain free support on Nethereum Discord channel.