Trustchain

This repo hosts the reference implementation of Trustchain.

Trustchain is a decentralised approach to public key infrastructure designed for application to digital identity. In particular, it builds on the W3C standards for decentralised identifiers (DID) and verifiable credentials (VC).

These two standards are closely linked: credential verification involves retrieval of verification material contained in the issuer's DID document. For example, the verification material may be a public key, in which case the verification method is to use the key to verify a digital signature contained in the VC.

Trustchain enables the creation of DIDs which are themselves verifiable. Via this mechanism, chains of trustworthy DIDs can be constructed in which downstream DIDs (dDIDs) contain an attestation from an entity represented by an upstream DID (uDID).

More information about the concept and state of development can be found on our wiki. The following links may be of particular interest:

• Trustchain on Github pages
• Trustchain preprint
• Trustchain FAQ
• Slides & videos
• Technical notes

Installation guide

This brief guide is intended for experienced users/developers who want to get started quickly. See the full guide for more detailed, platform-specific instructions.

Step 1. Install ION

Trustchain delegates all DID method operations to a wrapped node on the ION network.

The ION install guide gives step-by-step instructions on how to setup and run your own ION node.

We encountered a few problems with the official installation guide. Hence we recommend to use our modified instructions for ION installation on Mac or ION installation on Linux.

Step 2. Install Rust

Follow the Rust install guide.

Step 3. Install Trustchain

Trustchain can be built and tested using cargo:

git clone https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/trustchain.git
cd trustchain
cargo build

Install the Trustchain CLI with:

cargo install --path trustchain-cli

Usage Guide

Once installed, the CLI is callable with:

trustchain-cli --help

DID subcommands:

trustchain-cli did --help

Verifiable credential subcommands:

trustchain-cli vc --help

Testing

Run unit tests with:

cargo test

To include integration tests, which will fail unless a running ION node is reachable on localhost, use:

cargo test -- --include-ignored

License & disclaimer

Trustchain is distributed under the terms of both the MIT license and the Apache License (Version 2.0).

See LICENSE-MIT and LICENSE-APACHE for details.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported, in whole or in part, by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation [INV-001309].