How can I get program author on solana?

Question

I'm curious if there is any way to get author of solana smart contract. In the case of solidity, I have used save msg.sender in constructor to keep owner address of the contract.

contract KeepOwner {
    address private _owner;
    constructor() {
        _owner = msg.sender;
    }

    function isOwner(address likeOwner) public view returns (bool) {
        return likeOwner == _owner;
    }
}

But I can't find any method to save and get author(who have sent deploy transaction) pubkey on solana. I have tried to get the information from AccountInfo of solana program but couldn't success.

user_17346443 · Answer

Hardcoding the owner's private information into the program is not secure, so we should use another method to verify whether an account is the owner or not. We can use an SPL token to represent ownership of a program.

Mint an SPL token with only 1 supply.
Hardcode the pubkey of that mint into the program.
Deploy your program.

Of course, you should check if the account has the hardcoded mint token balance to check if that account is the owner of the program or not. You can transfer ownership by transferring the spl token. Also can extend functionalities along functionalities of the SPL token as well.

user_16310679 · Answer

There are two ways of doing this, depending on what exactly you're looking for:

You can look at all past transaction signatures involving the program address using https://docs.solana.com/developing/clients/jsonrpc-api#getsignaturesforaddress followed by https://docs.solana.com/developing/clients/jsonrpc-api#gettransaction for each signature. Any instructions to the BPF Upgradeable Loader (BPFLoaderUpgradeab1e11111111111111111111111) or BPF Loader 2 (BPFLoader2111111111111111111111111111111111) programs will likely be signed by the program author.
If the program is associated with the upgradeable loader (BPFLoaderUpgradeab1e11111111111111111111111), then there may be an "upgrade authority" who can upgrade the program. This could be a good proxy for the "author" of the program. If you look at the stake pool program in the explorer, you'll see that 4SnSuUtJGKvk2GYpBwmEsWG53zTurVM8yXGsoiZQyMJn is the upgrade authority: https://explorer.solana.com/address/SPoo1Ku8WFXoNDMHPsrGSTSG1Y47rzgn41SLUNakuHy

How can I get program author on solana?

2 Answers