README.md

Hyperidentity

🌏🆔  Decentralized Identity

Hyperidentity tried to solve the core problem of centralized web services: vendor lock-in, data-ownership, and single-point-of-failure.

npm i -g hyperidentity

Table of Contents

• Usage
• API
  • Identity
    • id = identity(archive)
    • id.archive
    • id.setMeta(meta, cb)
    • id.getMeta(cb)
    • token = id.serviceLinkToken(service, archiveKey)
    • id.acceptLinkToken(token, cb(err))
    • id.verifyAcceptingness(service, cb(err, verified))
• Architecture
• License

Usage

You can use Hyperidentity from CLI:

• Create an identity at ./me:

$ hi init me
56d0a72488190d37aaa28447a5600eafe67df00bf89ab646def449c17e331a56 // your identity key

• Login to a service:

$ hi login me token

• show a list of services you've logged-in and your identity key

$ hi info me

• bring your identity online:

$ hi up me

API

check out test/signup.js, test/service.js, and example to see how to implement a web service accepting hyperidentity.

Identity

An identity is a user with the data he/she want to share with the service. It can also replicate data generated by web services.

var identity = require('hyperidentity').identity

id = identity(archive)

Create a new identity with a hyperdrive archive.

id.archive

The archive used by this ID.

id.setMeta(meta, cb)

Set metadata of the ID

id.getMeta(cb)

Get metadata of the ID

token = id.serviceLinkToken(service, archiveKey)

Create a link token for id for the following purpose:

1. verify user really own the ID(archive)
2. give user a service-owned archive to link to its ID.

service is a hyperservice instance.

Returns a token string.

id.acceptLinkToken(token, cb(err))

Accept a link token. Under the hood, this will:

1. write a response to .proofs/${service.publicKey}
2. link archiveKey at .links/${service.publicKey}

id.verifyAcceptingness(service, cb(err, verified))

Check whether id accepted the link token from service.

Architecture

Hyperidentity use a hybrid architecture between fully decentralized web and traditional web service.

In hyperidentity, we use a p2p hypermedia protocol called Dat to store the most important thing on the web: the data you've created.

Modern web application is all about creating and sharing data in a scalable way. The Dat protocol allows us to both control our data and share it to the web service we trust. Each web service can have their own peer to replicate your data, or just use existing peers as backend. Since all peers have the same data and only you, as the host, can update the data being shared, it avoids problems such as vendor lock-in and single-point-of-failure.

However, it's very limiting if the web services can never write their own data. To solve the problem, hyperidentity use decentralized-symlink to link your identity to an archive hosted by the web service. By merging two archive together, hyperidentity becomes an decentralized eventually-consistent storage.

Since the service-hosted archive is also publicly replicated between you and the web services, you can save or fork the archive whenever backup or data-migration is needed.

License

The MIT License