Verifying the integrity of the wallet address
As you know, in the world of cryptocurrency there is no central bank and no central register of accounts. How can you make sure that your payment transfers to the correct recipient and is not misdirected? Since there is no mechanism in distributed ledger to return the misdirected money, it is lost forever. You can also be attacked by a phishing attack, when a hacker creates an address very similar to original one. For these reasons we may need to confirm ownership of certain wallet address.
To make sure that you have sent your money to the correct addressee, you must check the integrity of the recipient’s address. This can be done by signing the sender address with the recipient’s private key.
Consider the following situation:
Bob will send the money to Alice:
Bob sends his own wallet address to Alice:
Alice signs Bob’s wallet address with her private key:
Alice sends signed message to Bob:
Bob verifies the Alice’s message:
Bob sends money to Alice:
Bob’s money has been transferred to Alice:
As you can see, it’s easy to make sure the money transfer is safe! Follow the tutorial and find out how signing and verifying wallet addresses can be easy on MyEtherWallet.
