BORSH, binary serializer for security-critical projects.

Borsh stands for "Binary Object Representation Serializer for Hashing". It is meant to be used in security-critical projects as it prioritizes consistency, safety, speed; and comes with a strict specification. In short, Borsh is a non self-describing binary serialization format. It is designed to serialize any objects to canonical and deterministic set of bytes.

General principles of Borsh serialization:

• Integers are encoded in little-endian format.
• The size of dynamic containers (such as hash maps and hash sets) is written as a 32-bit unsigned integer before the values.
• All unordered containers are ordered lexicographically by key, with a tie breaker of the value.
• Structs are serialized in the order of their fields.
• Enums are serialized by storing the ordinal as an 8-bit unsigned integer, followed by the data contained within the enum value (if present).

This is Elixir implementation of the Borsh serializer and deserializer. Official specification: https://github.com/near/borsh#specification

A little article on Medium about Borsh serializer in more details: https://medium.com/@alexfilatov/borsh-binary-serialiser-for-near-protocol-eed79a1638f4

If available in Hex, the package can be installed by adding borsh to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:borsh, "~> 0.1"}
  ]
end

  use Borsh,
      schema: [
        signer_id: :string,
        public_key: {:borsh, PublicKey},
        nonce: :u64,
        receiver_id: :string,
        block_hash: [32],
        actions: [
          {:borsh, ActionOne}, 
          {:borsh, ActionTwo}
        ]
      ]

In this example ActionOne, ActionTwo and PublicKey are structs that implement Borsh protocol.

schema: Borsh schema itself, structure of fields for serialisation with serialisation formats described below.

:string - string, encoded as utf-8 bytes

[32] and [64] - A string with 32/64 chars length.

:u8 - unsigned 8-bit integer

:u16 - unsigned 16-bit integer

:u32 - unsigned 32-bit integer

:u64 - unsigned 64-bit integer

:i8 - signed 8-bit integer

:i16 - signed 16-bit integer

:i32 - signed 32-bit integer

:i64 - signed 64-bit integer

:f32 - 32-bit float

:f64 - 64-bit float

To define custom types for serialization, we can use the syntax {:borsh, StructModule} in a parent struct, when we want to serialize another struct within it. There are single and arrays of borsh types.

{:borsh, Module} - The syntax represents a single struct of a borsh-encoded module. When this struct is passed to the serializer, the serializer will execute the .borsh_encode method of the struct's module on the struct.

:borsh - has the same effect as {:borsh, Module}, but the resulting serialized data cannot be decoded back into the original struct. Using :borsh for serialization is safe for sending transactions to the NEAR blockchain, as the main concern is just the serialization itself.

[{:borsh, Module}] - represents an enumeration of borsh-encoded structs, where each element of the list must have a Borsh schema.

[:borsh] - has the same effect as [{:borsh, Module}], but the resulting serialized data cannot be decoded back into the original structs. It can only be used for encoding, not decoding.

[{:borsh, Module1}, {:borsh, Module2}] - represents an enumeration of borsh-encoded structs, where each element of the list must have a Borsh schema. Each element in the list can belong to a different module, and the sequence of elements is important. This syntax can be used for both encoding and decoding.

Copyright © 2021-present Alex Filatov <[email protected]>

This work is free. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
terms of the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more details.