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fspreiss committed Oct 30, 2024
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# Chain-key testing canister: testing tECDSA, tSchnorr, and vetKD
# Chain-key testing canister

The chain-key testing canister is a canister smart contract that provides a [fake](https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/mocksArentStubs.html#TheDifferenceBetweenMocksAndStubs) implementation of the APIs of various chain-key-related features **for testing purposes**. The shortcut that canister takes compared to the production APIs is that it relies on a cryptographic key that is hard-coded into the canister, rather than relying on a key that is distributed among the subnet nodes. With this, the implementation is inherently **insecure**: see [Disclaimer](#disclaimer).
The chain-key testing canister is a canister smart contract that provides a [fake](https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/mocksArentStubs.html#TheDifferenceBetweenMocksAndStubs) implementation of the APIs of various chain-key-related features including threshold ECDSA, threshold Schnorr, and threshold key derivation (vetKeys) **for testing purposes**. The shortcut that this canister takes (compared to the production APIs) is that it relies on a cryptographic key that is hard-coded into the canister, rather than relying on a key that is distributed among the subnet nodes. With this, the implementation is inherently **insecure**: see [Disclaimer](#disclaimer).

The main advantage of using this canister is to *save costs during testing*, because there are [fees](https://internetcomputer.org/docs/current/references/t-sigs-how-it-works#api-fees) associated with using the chain-key features via the Internet Computer's management canister APIs.

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