☂️ Next HALO features

[dmaretskyi]

Next HALO features

Globally addressible identity

• Updating the credetials system to make identify accounts (identities) by a DID
• Integration with a DID resolver to enable loose coupling between the DID and the root key of the identity (IdentityKey)
• Support did:key and did:plc methods

did:plc

• spec
• Registry specified in config
• Self hosted or https://plc.directory (hosted by BlueSky)
• Client-side caching for DID documents
• DID document should contain the root identity key as on of the verification keys with the #dxos tag.
• DID document may contain an IPFS CID linking to public profile data
  • Decide on the encoding https://ipld.io/docs/codecs/known/
  • Public profile data should be cached client-side
  • Evicting outdated documents from cache
  • Retry strategy for when registry is unavailable
  • Cache support for ETag header?
• New identities that are created should register the DID document on configured registry
  • DID generation and signing is fully client-side registry access is not authenticated

Public profile

• Globally adressible DID documentes allow for a public user profile
• With did:plc only a subset of devices will be able to mutate the DID document - those having "recovery keys"
• Initially only some devices will be able to mutate the profile document (change the identity display name for example)
• A a profile sync protocol between devices might be devised in the future

UCAN

• https://github.com/ucan-wg/spec
• UCAN is a superset of the current HALO Credentils
• UCANs natively support DIDs
• Consider switching from the credentials encoding to UCAN
• Deside on the ontology of the control feed messages: UCAN, signed-message, control-message
• Space permissions:
  • data:read/write
  • presence:read/write
  • ☂️ Next ECHO features #4346 (comment)
• Default space permissions for peers without membership: read-only on data and/or presence:read/write

Credential state machiene

• Credential state machiene must ensure total order
• State machiene must be able to be reverted in case the total oreder changes
• Initially we might just trigger a fault and restart the app in case the order changess

Contact book

• Synced list of contacts between peers
• Integrates with the DID documents and public profile
• Invitation-like flow to add new peers to the contact book
• Ability to add peers manually by their DID
• Offline space invitaions for peers from the contact book

Tasks [todo]

• Create a @dxos/did-plc package
  • Data models
  • Client for the did:plc registry
  • DID document signing and hashing functions
• Create a @dxos/credentials-ucan ucan package with a UCAN-based credentials state machiene
  • Possible spin-off into a generic @dxos/ucan package
• Integration into ECHO [TODO]

[dmaretskyi]