cord3c-project

Here you find W3C DID/VC, REST, HTTP and monitoring support for R3 Corda!

Corda is an open source blockchain/DLT project with a strong focus on privacy and scalability to address the needs of enterprises. Target market of Corda are business-to-business transactions in finance and insurance markets. Its architecture makes it equally well applicable to a wide range of other markets. This project aims at unlocking some of that potential. Our steps are:

• Native support for W3C Verifiable Credentials (VCs) and Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) to make identities and claims about those identities first-class citizen in Corda (aka native SSI for Corda). Possibilities are endless by modelling the world from people to objects and relationships among them with DIDs and VCs. VCs can be created, signed, exchanged, verified, and saved in a vault not unlike Corda transactions.
• Focus on W3C standards to (over time) support a wide range of SSI implementations (soverin, uport, etc.).
• Letting every Corda node gain a DID, make it discoverable using universal resolvers, and let it issue VCs. An adapter HTTP service thereby bridges between network maps and universal resolvers.
• Support for did:web method to bootstrap DIDs with HTTPS to ease development and avoid relying on other more complex SSI implementation from start.
• Allow end-users and IoT devices carry a DID to participate in transactions.
• Support for hashlink to implement content integrity protection for W3C VCs.
• Adoptions of JSON Web Signatures for VCs to ease signing and verifying by any device, from a Corda server to browsers, mobiles and IoT devices.
• A REST API following the open JSON:API specification complementing the proprietary Corda RPC protocol to ease working with Corda across a wider range of clients.
• A monitoring endpoint offering health checking and Prometheus-based metrics.

In a second step we consider deeper integration of VCs into Corda to support:

1. Every issued VC is available as Corda transaction with the VC as output state. VCs can be used as reference state in Corda transactions. HashLinks are used to construct PersistStateRef.
2. VCs gain a lifecycle status by carrying the consumed or unconsumed status.
3. Blurring the boundaries between Corda transactions/states and W3C VCs by modelling the former with the later. The benefits are two-fold: let W3C VCs gain Corda functionality like notarization and UXTO and let W3C VC implementations consume transactions vice versa. JSON as data format renders transactions human-readable! Non-Java application can start creating, retrieving and verifying data with little effort. Existing tools allow to customize the mapping of data to Java objects while helping with aspects like compatibility, versioning and upgrades.

This project is under early but active development. Feedback very welcomed.

It is important to note that all extensions are complementary to the existing Corda features and can be used together or individually with any Corda server.

Example

This project hosts a cord3c-example-cordapp to showcase a cordapp that makes use of all the features. It is containerized with cord3c-example-node. The application gets deployed to DigitalOcean and system testing happens with cord3c-example-systemTest, which is also a good example how external consumers can interact with the REST API of the Corda node.

The endpoint is publicly accessible for anybody to look around. Some interesting links to visit:

• http://174.138.101.25/api/node/ entry point to discover JSON:API node API. Everything is linked with HATEOAS for eased exploration.
• http://174.138.101.25/api/map/ is a matching JSON-API endpoint of our networkmap-to-SSI adapter.
• http://174.138.101.25/.well-known/did.json serves the DID of the network map (with its root key).
• http://174.138.101.25/parties/DL8VrsqpbxTCLL9gnnJYTqreeY5Y98yQ2645f1EE8zqTox serves the DID for the party having the short name DL8VrsqpbxTCLL9gnnJYTqreeY5Y98yQ2645f1EE8zqTox
• http://174.138.101.25/api/map/party lists all the parties, including their DID.
• http://174.138.101.25/api/node/verifiableCredential lists all recorded VCs.
• http://174.138.101.25/api/node/verifiableCredential?filter[credential.issuanceDate][GT]=2020-06-14T11:42:05.812Z&sort=credential.issuer&page[limit]=10 as example for sorting and filtering with JSON:API (any other endpoint can also be searched and filtered). More information about the available parameters can be found here.
• http://174.138.101.25/api/node/flow endpoint to post new flows and get currently and recently ran flows.

FIXME: move to HTTPS to make DIDs discoverable from https://uniresolver.io/ and other implementations using did:web:174.138.101.25 (or a domain name) FIXME: add curl example to trigger flows, else?

Requirements

cord3c still requires Java 8 due to limitations of Corda. JDK 8 is automatically downloaded and used by Gradle using jdk-bootstrap.

IDE

Dewvelopment takes place with IntelliJ IDEA, but should also work with any other IDE. In IDEA, make sure to have the Lombok plugin installed (is the default) and annotation processing enabled (also default).

Building from Source

cord3c make use of Gradle for its build. To build the project run:

./gradlew build

Running the example node

To locally start a Corda node with the cord3c components and example application installed use:

gradlew :cord3c-example-node:run

or

docker run --name example --rm -i -t -p 8090:8090 cord3c/example-node

The API endpoint will be available at:

http://localhost:8090/api/

Some further URLs to play around:

http://127.0.0.1:8080/api/movie
FIXME

Running the network map adapter

Start a Cordite network map (or configure any kind of existing network map):

docker run -p 8080:8080 --rm  -e NMS_TLS=false --name networkmap -t -i  -e NMS_PARAM_UPDATE_DELAY=0S -e NMS_STORAGE_TYPE=file  cordite/network-map:v0.4.5

And then run the adapter with:

  ./gradlew :cord3c-ssi-networkmap-adapter:run

or

TODO

Integration with existing Corda setup

TODO properties cordapps

Licensing

cord3c is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. You can grab a copy of the license at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.