code: Compute signatures over a deterministic and canonical representation of the data

[romac]

Because Protobuf serialization is not canonical ^{1 2}, data encoded using Protobuf should not be used for hashing, signatures, hashmap keys, etc.

This is the reason why the NEAR team developed borsh and we might want to switch to that for our to_sign_bytes implementation in the test and example apps.

Alternatives to Protobuf for canonical serialization

• borsh
• bcs

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/issues/3417 ↩

2. https://protobuf.dev/programming-guides/serialization-not-canonical/) ↩

[cason]

In Comet this is pretty messy, lets try to find an elegant way of doing so.

[cason]

For instance, but there are multiple examples of that:

https://github.com/cometbft/cometbft/blob/fc0458fa74ba0f2a48169df81a3b9939aacac561/types/block.go#L1528-L1537