I understand with curve25519
that the private key for secret.box
is clamped...
I understand that this clamping process to clear the lower 3 bits in order to ensure the key is a multiple of 8, ensuring it's part of the right cyclic subgroup.
However, as I generate example keyPairs using sodium such as:
a67e2d949d00606d2b6d0d9114d3ee273f118a078151c7aad2b55694ea18bb39 // 1010011001111110001011011001010010011101000000000110000001101101001010110110110100001101100100010001010011010011111011100010011100111111000100011000101000000111100000010101000111000111101010101101001010110101010101101001010011101010000110001011101100111001
or
b2c80def0dc392671e5143e9804c1083a39c751eec7348383eb586d708b374cc // 1011001011001000000011011110111100001101110000111001001001100111000111100101000101000011111010011000000001001100000100001000001110100011100111000111010100011110111011000111001101001000001110000011111010110101100001101101011100001000101100110111010011001100
I noticed that despite being able to positively confirm they are part of the multiple of 8 subgroup, their binary representation does not have the lower three bits cleared...
So as you can see above, the binary representation of these random private keys doesn't have 000
for the lowest three bits. Yet when I check in SageMath, I can confirm both of these keys are multiples of 8.
Update: I generated the keys using the libSodium->SecretBox->KeyPair()...
Which internally calls the clamping/scalar multiplication.
I also verified that despite not ending in three zeros (000)
- the private keys are always of order 7237005577332262213973186563042994240857116359379907606001950938285454250989
and as such are of the correct subgroup.
Any idea why?