Terms

Glossary of Stealth address terms.

Stealth Address

Stealth addresses allow senders of transactions or transfers to non-interactively generate private accounts exclusively accessible by their recipients.

The recipients alone can access the funds stored at their stealth addresses, as they are the sole owners of the necessary private key.

Stealth Meta-Address

A stealth meta-address is a set of one or two public keys that can be used to compute a stealth address for a given recipient.

It is composed of:

• spending key

  A private key that can be used to spend funds sent to a stealth address. A “spending public key” is the corresponding public key.

• viewing key

  A private key that can be used to determine if funds sent to a stealth address belong to the recipient who controls the corresponding spending key. A “viewing public key” is the corresponding public key.

Learn more (opens in a new tab)

Scheme Id

Each stealth address scheme is identified by a unique identifier called the schemeID.

The implementation of the methods generateStealthAddress, checkStealthAddress, and computeStealthKey are scheme-specific, and so the scheme ID is used to determine which implementation to use.

The first implementation, with schemeId of 1 uses SECP256k1 elliptic curve cryptography.

Stealth Key

Refers to the private key associated with a stealth address.

Ephemeral Public Key

The ephemeral public key is generated from a random ephemeral private key and is used to compute the shared secret, enabling the recipient to decrypt announcements and verify their relevance to the user.

It is "ephemeral" because it is used only once to derive the corresponding stealth address and its associated details.

View Tag

The first byte of the metadata field in the Announce event log emitted from the ERC5564Announcer contract.

The view tag allows for more effective lookup when checking if the stealth address is intended for the recipient.

If the view tag doesn't match the expected, then the rest of the checking logic can be skipped.