base58

base58 is a fast, cryptographically secure, purely Go implementation of Base58 with resistance to side-channel attacks.

Security

This package provides constant-time functions (base58.Encode and base58.Decode) that convert from/to Base58 strings, which offers cryptographic security that resists side-channel attacks such as timing attacks. As far as the author knows, there are no libraries so far that provide constant-time functions. The author checked the following libraries so far:

• https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd/tree/13152b35e191385a874294a9dbc902e48b1d71b0/btcutil/base58
• https://github.com/itchyny/base58-go/blob/v0.2.1/base58.go
• https://github.com/trezor/trezor-crypto/blob/915b3dbbbf58c262865647728a3463b8785fc965/base58.c#L149
• https://github.com/akamensky/base58/blob/71d82f380f85866825434c181ba341ec09cba13b/base58.go
• https://github.com/mr-tron/base58/blob/v1.2.0/base58.go

Benchmarks

This package provides variable-time functions (base58.VartimeEncode and base58.VartimeDecode) as well.

$ go version
go version go1.25.2 darwin/arm64
$ go test -bench=5K .
goos: darwin
goarch: arm64
pkg: github.com/koba-e964/base58-go
cpu: Apple M2
BenchmarkDecode_ConstantTime_5K-8            679           1798649 ns/op           3.85 MB/s        5376 B/op          1 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecode_VariableTime_5K-8           8347            121181 ns/op          57.13 MB/s      338043 B/op        126 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncode_ConstantTime_5K-8            236           5192019 ns/op           0.96 MB/s       12288 B/op          2 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncode_VariableTime_5K-8            912           1209566 ns/op           4.13 MB/s       24664 B/op        686 allocs/op
PASS
ok      github.com/koba-e964/base58-go  6.809s

The performance of base58.VartimeEncode and base58.VartimeDecode is comparable to that of github.com/btcsuite/btcd/btcutil/base58:

$ go test -bench=5K .
goos: darwin
goarch: arm64
pkg: github.com/btcsuite/btcd/btcutil/base58
cpu: Apple M2
BenchmarkBase58Encode_5K-8   	     944	   1318152 ns/op	   3.79 MB/s
BenchmarkBase58Decode_5K-8   	    8816	    139034 ns/op	  49.12 MB/s
PASS
ok  	github.com/btcsuite/btcd/btcutil/base58	3.318s
$ git log --max-count=1
commit aa58ce24b9dea750aedaad8f0f2b5fd6475af4cc (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD)
Merge: 380c66b1 c448768d
Author: Yong <[email protected]>
Date:   Thu Feb 13 10:36:07 2025 +0800

    Merge pull request #2317 from finaltrip/master
    
    refactor: using slices.Contains to simplify the code
$ go version
go version go1.24.0 darwin/arm64

Docs

https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/koba-e964/base58-go