eosc command-line swiss-knife

eosc is a cross-platform (Windows, Mac and Linux) command-line tool for interacting with an EOS.IO blockchain.

It contains tools for voting and a Vault to securely store private keys.

It is based on the eos-go library, used in eos-bios, the tool used to launch the EOS mainnet.

This first release holds simple tools, but a whole cleos-like swiss-knife is being developed and will be released shortly after mainnet launch. Source code for most operations is already available in this repository.

Installation

1. Install from https://github.com/eoscanada/eosc/releases

or

2. Build from source with:

go get -u -v github.com/eoscanada/eosc/eosc

Vote now!

Once installed run:

eosc vault create --import

to import your keys and follow instructions.

Then run:

eosc vote --help

and run somethig like this:

eosc vote producers [your account] [producer1] [producer2] [producer3]

Make sure you have version v0.7.0 or higher:

eosc version

Read more below for details.

eosc vault

The eosc vault is a simple yet powerful EOS wallet.

Import keys in new wallet

You can import externally generated private keys with vault create --import call.

You will then be asked to paste your private key in an interactive prompt. The private key is not shown on screen during the import. It will display the corresponding public key which you should cross-check.

$ eosc vault create --import -c "Imported key"
Enter passphrase to encrypt your vault: ****
Confirm passphrase: ****
Type your first private key: ****
Type your next private key or hit ENTER if you are done:
Imported 1 keys. Let's secure them before showing the public keys.
Wallet file "./eosc-vault.json" created. Here are your public keys:
- EOS6MRyAjQq8ud7hVNYcfnVPJqcVpscN5So8BhtHuGYqET5GDW5CV

Your private keys will be encrypted using your passphrase. See below for cryptographic primitives used.

New wallet with new keys

Create a new wallet with:

$ eosc vault create --keys 2
Created 2 keys. Let's secure them before showing the public keys.
Enter passphrase to encrypt your keys:
Confirm passphrase:
Wallet file "./eosc-vault.json" created. Here are your public keys:
- EOS7MEGq9FVb2Ve4bsZEan1t146TKCyo8dKtLvihrNhGbPLCPLjXd
- EOS5QoyZwJvpPjmZAa3HdgTn2FdNABBffXLD95WPagiARmaAHMhin

Add keys to an existing vault

To add an externally generated private key to an existing vault, use:

$ eosc vault add
Vault file not found, creating a new wallet
Type your first private key:        [insert your private key here, NOT shown]
Type your next private key or hit ENTER if you are done:
Keys imported. Let's secure them before showing the public keys.
Enter passphrase to encrypt your keys:
Confirm passphrase:
Wallet file "./eosc-vault.json" written. Here are your ADDED public keys:
- EOS5tb61aZMAfQqKDsnkscFq76JXxNdi7ZhkUmkVZUkU4zPzfeAFx
Total keys writteN: 3

The vault operations do zero network calls and can be done offline. The file is encrypted, can safely be archived and is future proof.

Casting your votes

With an eosc-vault.json, you can vote:

$ eosc vote producers youraccount eoscanadacom someotherfavo riteproducer
Enter passphrase to unlock vault:
Voter [youraccount] voting for: [eoscanadacom]
Done

This will sign your vote transaction locally, and submit the transaction to the network through the https://mainnet.eoscanada.com endpoint. You can also point to some other endpoints that are on the main network with -u or --api-url.

Find what your account it on https://eosquery.com/

Cryptographic primitives used

The cryptography used is NaCl (C implementation, Javascript port, Go version, which we use). And key derivation is Argon2, using the Go library here.

You can inspect the crypto code in our codebase regarding the passphrase implementation: it is 61 lines, including blanks and comments.

Features in the work

• Have serve default to asking a confirmation on the command line before signing each transactions.
• Add --accept to auto-accepts signatures (only if listening on a local address).
• Shamir Secret Sharing-encoded wallets, with support for fast and easy multi-sig, even through a secure network.
• A full suite of tools to help Block Producers, developers, end users, in their every day life.

FAQ

Q: Why not use cleos instead ?

A: cleos is hard to compile, being in C++, as it requires a huge toolchain. eosc works on Windows where cleos doesn't. eosc contains a wallet inside, and is able to use it to sign some transactions, cleos interfaces with yet another program (keosd) in order to sign transactions, making it more complex to use. eosc brings keosd and cleos together in a swiss-knify package.

ERRATA: Previouly, you could read It uses sha512 key derivation, which is faster to brute force, the Argon2 key derivation is stronger and would take an attacker a *lot* more efforts to bruteforce.. It was incorrect as cleos generates a big random password for you which is effectively very hard to brute force, no matter which derivation algo you are using. The fact that cleos doesn't allow you to choose your passphrase is a difference, but mostly in usability. You need to store that large password somewhere, right?