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I have often seen the secret component of an asymmetric key pair referred as secret key as well. See libsodium for example. Maybe it's because curve/ed 25519 secrets are 32 random bytes unlike RSA keys which have specific structure which makes them distinct from generic secrets.


It also allows "pk" and "sk" as overly short variable names, an argument developpers are sometimes tempted by!


Absolutely, it's very convenient when working on a whiteboard :)




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