Hyperledger Identity Management

The Problem.

Throughout the hackathon, the Spot Exchange team has been working to create a fully functioning application that included self registration. Due to the nature of private and permissioned ledgers usually only including trusted parties, this is something that had not been accomplished before. Upon installing the passport-github middleware for authentication on the ledger, we found that although the user could successfully log-in via OAuth, we did not know which user that token was associated with or if they were even a registered user on the ledger. This project successfully bridges that gap, linking our customers off-chain and on-chain identities.

HIM

Hyperledger Identity Manager (HIM) is the glue that lies on top of the Hyperledger connecting our customers and their on-chain identities. It funnels all the ledger requests and authentication requests through one access point that can filter out non-authorized users via token validation and backup to mongoDB the user's profile as well as sync them on the ledger. At the foundation, HIM is a plain node.js server that has auth routes that reflect the business logic on the ledger. In the case of registration, the client will POST a user profile to the registry which in turn creates a mongoDB and ledger user entry with matching information. Once the registration is successfully completed, the client will have to log-in through the same auth route to which a JWT token is issued (stored on the client side) and used on all future requests to the glue (HIM). Whenever the client makes a business request to HIM, the route will fire tokenMiddleware.verifyToken which will determine if the token is valid and to whom it belongs. If the token is valid, it will query the Hyperledger; if not, it will throw an error (401 Unauthorized). With HIM we were able to successfully build/deploy an application with registration, authentication, spot creation, and the populating of our maps. By designing the Hyperledger Identity Management (HIM), the Spot Exchange team was able to design an innovative application which can securely utilize the blockchain ledger despite the current challenges and shortcomings.

Dependencies

npm install

Config Server

{
  "server": {
    "hostName": "localhost",
    "port": "8888"
  },
  "token": {
    "secret": "secretapplication",
    "expiresInSeconds": "2628000"
  },
  "database": {
    "address":"mongodb://localhost:27017/spot-network"
  }
}

Run

node glue