[Crypto Q&A] Can secrets or passwords be stored on the Ethereum network?

Guest

All data on Ethereum is public. It is not possible to store secrets or passwords in Ethereum contracts without it being seen by all. There is work being done to make this a possibility through code obfuscation and other techniques. A good read would be “Privacy on the Blockchain” by Vitalik Buterin.

It is not possible to store secrets or passwords in Ethereum contracts without it being seen by all

A good read would be “Privacy on the Blockchain” by Vitalik Buterin.

Blockchain

There is no complete way of doing this. One approach you could look at is: You could commit to the secret in advance (by having the contract hold a hash of the secret). When you know the recipient you could send them the secret encrypted with their public key, which they can then decrypt and check matches the earlier committed hash. Nothing forces you to do this, but at least you can't change your mind on what the secret was after the fact. NB - nothing forces you to actually reveal the secret though.

nope

can't

no part of the Ethereum protocol involves encryption; that is to say all communications with the Ethereum platform and between nodes (including transaction data) are unencrypted and can (necessarily) be read by anyone. This is so everyone can verify the correctness of state updates and consensus can be reached. In the future, advanced cryptographic tools, such as zero knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption, will be available that will allow for some encrypted calculations to be recorded on the blockchain while still enabling consensus; however, while provision has been made for them, they have yet to be deployed. Therefore, no secrets or passwords can be stored on the Ethereum network.

well

no