We have asymmetric cryptography, but the main systems all have trade-offs:
RSA: You can encrypt/decrypt and sign/verify, but you cannot derive hierarchical public/private keys—every key pair must be generated independently.
ECDSA (elliptic curves): You can sign/verify, and you can derive hierarchical deterministic keys (HD wallets!), but you cannot do encryption/decryption natively.
So here’s the challenge:
Can anyone design an asymmetric key system that can do all five things:
1. Encrypt
2. Decrypt
3. Sign
4. Verify
5. Hierarchical key derivation (master → child public/private keys)
Right now, no single system can do this perfectly. Either you get encryption or hierarchical keys, but not both.
If we could create such a system, it would unify digital identity, secure messaging, and deterministic key management in a single cryptosystem.
I’d love to see ideas, proposals, or even wild theoretical approaches. Has anyone tried combining elliptic-curve deterministic keys with encryption in a clean way?
Oiko