Add the ability to sign a message to the Solana Ledger app

[fragosti]

Problem

At Phantom, we've implemented a signMessage feature that allows an application to request signing an arbitrary message. This feature is being used by Audius on Solana to authenticate users, and is popular on Ethereum for applications like OpenSea that also rely on it to authenticate their users.

A long-standing issue with this feature is that the Solana Ledger app (https://github.com/LedgerHQ/app-solana) does not support signing arbitrary messages, and so this feature does not work for Ledger users.

Proposed Solution

Add support for signing arbitrary data (or just utf8 strings) to the Solana Ledger app. @t-nelson mentioned that support would need to be added to solana-remote-wallet and the CLI as well.

[t-nelson]

Would ASCII do? The Ledger's font doesn't support all of UTF8 and I'm fairly certain a UTF8 compliant transaction message could be constructed

[fragosti]

If there are security reasons for just doing ASCII, sure, but our preference would be UTF8.

https://docs.phantom.app/integrating/signing-a-message

[t-nelson]

Yeah the inability of the ledger to actually display all UTF8 messages is pretty much a non-starter IMO

[kinosang]

Is there any draft or standard about the signature? Does it use the similar algorithm as BIP-322 and ERC-191?

[dahifi]

Star Atlas would like this fixed as well. The profile update page uses the message signing to allow clients to select avatar pics, and it works fine w Phantom and SolFlare, but Ledger users are not. I've been trying to trace the issue down and dealing with Ledger support the last few days. I've pinged their Discord admin and asked for a dev to pop in here for help figure out whether they can contribute utf support of if it'll have to be one of these 'allow blind signing' types of things.

[mralbertchen]

Genopets would like this fixed as well - our summoning / hatching function requires a signature of the answers to the hatching questions. It works well on Phantom but Ledger users currently have to send the eggs over to a non-ledger address in order to hatch.

[dahifi]

I spoke to @t-nelson via TG last week, he said that they actually don't need Ledger's assistance with this and that they (Solana) should be able to deliver a fix in 22Q1.

This works for Star Atlas team but obviously might need higher priority based on other projects' needs.

[adamq-q]

Portals would like this fixed as well! 🌀

[bmeeder22]

Phantasia would like this feature as well 🏈 🏀 ⚽

[Caribosaurus]

Same thing for https://piratesdelsol.com

[emperorgurgeh]

Planet owners at www.desolate.space are also begging for this :)

We need this for server side authentication of a user whose key is secured in a Ledger

[kirksgithub]

I will bump this also from Grape (https://verify.grapes.network with over 250k verified wallets) - we use message signing to verify user wallets, currently Ledger is supported only with a transaction from/to the same wallet, drawback is that the user will end up paying the gas fees until support for message signing is rolled out with Ledger

[GoJiTa972]

And I bump because I can't sign in into https://game.playmysteria.com/ nor grape as above.