How to decrypt an ECIES encrypted message using a geth account and JSON-RPC protocol?

Question

A geth node is managing an Ethereum account, having the control over its private key at keystore folder. I guess to keep it safe, best practices are letting geth by its own perform all operations that require access to the private key. Well, the case is I need to decrypt a message that was encrypted using the public key of the geth account, in order to be only readable by this account. So, is there any geth function via JSON-RPC capable of decrypting a message using the private key of the account? Something like this:

ECIES.Decrypt(account, message);

The only other choice is left seems to be accessing directly to the keystore folder and decrypt the message using the private key there, but I don't feel comfortable doing so, it seems a quite insecure scheme, right?

Ref.:

How to encrypt a message with the public-key of an Ethereum address

I couldn't find any ECIES function at https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/JSON-RPC so I guess this (encryption/decryption) is not posiible to do using JSON-RPC protocol, right? — Juan Ignacio Pérez Sacristán, May 15 '17 at 08:18

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered May 18 '17 at 18:45

2

You can't do that with Geth. However Parity does expose a module that does just that: see the parity_decryptMessage() function.

answered May 18 '17 at 18:45

David Ammouial

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Thanks for the bounty Juan. Please don't forget to mark the answer as correct if it's what you were expecting. – David Ammouial May 23 '17 at 01:17

How to decrypt an ECIES encrypted message using a geth account and JSON-RPC protocol?

1 Answers1