Abstract

This proposal establishes a standardized interface and functionality for applications to discover user accounts besides the readily available EOA. Specifically discovering normal accounts and smart accounts that may have been deployed or configured using a signing key that is not the standard Ethereum secp256k1 curve. The objective is to ensure uniformity of address retrieval across applications, and domains.

Motivation

The recent progress in account abstraction has led to significantly increased flexibility enabling use cases such as multi-signature transactions, social recovery, contract/account whitelisting, session keys and much more. However, with increased flexibility there comes an increased complexity. One area of increased complexity is account fragmentation -both at the EOA and smart account level - following from the inability to correctly identify all existing addresses by a user. In this EIP we present a potential solution that aims to unify the discovery and handling of such accounts.

Prior to ERC-4337, the standard approach to interacting with a smart contract account required a valid signature from a keypair using secp256k1. Since ERC-4337, alternative signing options have become popular, such as passkey, yubikey or ios/android secure enclaves, which do not conform to the secp256k1 curve, and require a paymaster to submit the transaction on the users behalf. Since providers implement additional logic into the key generation process (shamir, mpc, secure enclave, etc) alternative signers have no uniform way for a user to produce the same externally-owned account adresses, or smart account addresses across different applications.

Secure hardware devices such as native passkeys, or yubikeys generate a unique keypair per domain. The implication is for application developers that natively integrate authentication methods such as those, will never be able to recover a uniform keypair. Practically, if we have the following scenario where there are two applications: a mobile app (App A), and a web based application (App B). If both implement a solution such as passkey, App A and App B would recover two different keys. This poses a hurdle to the user who would expect to have the same address across services (much like they would using a hardware wallet, or other wallets).

With the introduction of 4337, this problem is amplified. An application that wants its users to leverage 4337 (to abstract keys away, and generally improve the onboarding experience) will not be able to detect if a user has an existing smart account deployed. This will lead to the developer (or third party service providing the onboarding experience) to deploy a smart account on behalf of the user at the given address scoped to the apps domain.

Not being able to correctly identify existing accounts owned by a user will lead to account fragmentation. The fragmentation, as described early, exists because applications will identify them as a new user, and not one whom may already have an account. Leading to a single user having many unassociated accounts, with assets scattered amongst them, and no way to unify them.

This standard aims to achieve:

  1. Standard way for applications to request a users signing address.
  2. Standard way for applications to provide single sign-on (SSO) functionality for alternative signing methods.
  3. Standard way for applications to disclose smart accounts that have been created through their own service.

This standard does not aim to achieve:

  1. How a user can sign messages across domains.
  2. How a provider generates a keypair for a user.
  3. How an application handles the user interface logic.

Specification

The key words “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHALL NOT”, “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, “RECOMMENDED”, “NOT RECOMMENDED”, “MAY”, and “OPTIONAL” in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 and RFC 8174.

Definitions

  • Smart account - An ERC-4337 compliant smart contract account that has a modular architecture.
  • Domain - A string of text acting as an identification to a server or wesbite (eg: ethereum.org or ABCDE12345.com.example.app).
  • EOA - Accounts that are controlled by a single private key.
  • Provider - A third party service provider that is able to authenticate a user and produce a keypair for the user.

Redirects

An application looking to authenticate a user must navigate the user to a given provider’s URI based on the URI Request Syntax. The application must implement a valid redirect URI for the callback in order to receive a valid response.

Available Routes

  • /auth/: The route used to authenticate a user, and request credentials.
  • /sendTransaction/: The route used to send a transaction payload for a user to sign. This is more of a convenient method to allow applications to do both authentication, and plugin registration within a single redirect, instead of requiring the user to perform two redirects.

Schema

The smart_account_address should be returned in the CAIP-10 format.

Auth Route

Request Schema

```= swagger parameters: - in: query name: redirect_uri schema: type: string description: The uri that the provider should redirect back to.

  • in: query name: chain_id schema: type: string description: The chain_id of a given network. ```
    Response Schema

    ```= swagger parameters:

  • in: query name: smart_account_address schema: type: string description: The on-chain address for a given smart account, formatted using CAIP-10 ```
Request Syntax

```= swagger https:///auth/? redirect_uri= &chain_id=

##### Response Syntax
```= swagger
https://<YOUR_REDIRECT_URI>/auth/?
    smart_account_address=<SMART_ACCOUNT_ADDRESS>

sendTransaction Route

Request Schema

```= swagger parameters: - in: query name: redirect_uri schema: type: string description: The uri that the provider should redirect back to.

  • in: query name: chain_id schema: type: string description: The chain_id of a given network.
  • in: query name: transaction schema: type: string description: The RLP encoded transaction that needs to be signed ```
    Response Schema

    ```= swagger parameters:

  • in: query name: smart_account_address schema: type: string description: The on-chain address for a given smart account, formatted using CAIP-10
  • in: query name: tx_hash schema: type: string description: The hash of the transaction ```
Request Syntax

```= swagger https:///sendTransaction/? redirect_uri= &chain_id= &transaction=

##### Response Syntax
```= swagger
https://<YOUR_REDIRECT_URI>/sendTransaction/?
    smart_account_address=<SMART_ACCOUNT_ADDRESS>
    &tx_hash=<TX_HASH>

Rationale

Redirects

Taking inspiration from how SSO functions in the web today. We implement a similar redirect pattern, consisting of a simple request/response.

Application

Initial Request

An application would redirect a user to a specified provider, only passing along the callback url information. This is to ensure the providers website can remain stateless, and not rely on web requests.

Response from provider

When a user is redirected to the application, it can parse the response for a signer address, and associated smart account address.

Provider

Upon a user navigating to the provider website, the provider would parse the redirect url and authenticate the user. The authentication method does not matter, such that it can produce a valid public address, and recover any smart accounts that may have been deployed through the provider.

Backwards Compatibility

No backward compatibility issues found.

Reference Implementation

Using location.replace() vs location.href is up to the application to decide how they wish the experience to be handled.

Sample URI Request

https://eth-sso.ethereum.org/auth?redirect_uri=http://myapp.com/eth-sso/callback/&chain_id=1

Sample Response

http://myapp.com/callback/?smart_account_address=0xb...c

Application logic

// https://myapp.com
// User triggered authentication function
function auth() {
    window.location.replace("https://eth-sso.ethereum.org/auth?redirect_uri=myapp.com&chain_id=1/eth-sso/callback/");
};

// App level routing logic (generic router)
route("/eth-sso/callback/", function() {
    let params = (new URL(document.location)).searchParams;
    let smartAccountAddress = params.get("smart_account_address");
});

Provider Logic

// eg: https://eth-sso.ethereum.org/auth
route("/eth-sso/callback/", function("/auth") {
    let params = (new URL(document.location)).searchParams;
    let redirectUrl = params.get("redirect_uri");
    // Authenticate the user (eg: with passkeys)
    let address = "...";
    // Get smart account if available
    let smartAccountAddress = getSmartAccount(address);
    window.location.replace(`http://${redirectUrl}/?smart_account_address=${smartAccountAddress}`);
});

Security Considerations

  • Is there a concern that a user can spoof another persons address, and that could be malicious? For example, circumventing the provider, and manually calling the redirect_url with a chosen address. A way around this would be having the user actually sign a challenge message, perhaps leveraging SIWE.

The absence of wildcard support in the redirect URI is intended to protect users from nested open redirect vulnerabilities. Allowing wildcards could enable attackers to redirect users to different pages under the supported wildcard, creating a vulnerability to open redirects.

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.