Encrypting data with Multichain addresses

Question

In the tutorial on stream confidentiality ( https://www.multichain.com/developers/stream-confidentiality/ ), in order to encrpyt and decrypt data, the example suggests generating RSA keypairs using Open-SSL , publishing to a pubkeys stream and encrypting data intended for the receiving with his pubkeys.

This adds an additional overhead of generating and maintaining a separate set of keys on the application side for each address.

Instead of that, why not sure multichain addresses (pub-priv key pair) to encrypt and decrypt the symkeys? I do not see encrypt or decrypt APIs available, only sign and verify.

What kind of external library would I need to use to use these multichain keys for encryption and decryption instead?

Or is there any other better approach for privacy

Answer 1

In principle, it's possible to use a MultiChain public key (from which the address is derived, and which is included in any signature) to encrypt some data which can only be decrypted using the corresponding private key. However this has not yet been added to MultiChain as a built-in feature. You might want to take a look at how it's implemented in the Electrum bitcoin wallet – we expect to port something like this to MultiChain in future.