What does this do?

[dazzaji]

What use cases does this address and what actions can I take? For example, could I use this to digitally sign something received by me and accessible to others on the web, email or an external drive such that I could apply the notion of a sovereign identity in practice with one or more other humans or organizations?

[miller46]

Sorry if the repo was not very clear. This is a proof of concept and launching off point for a digital identity system. It is still pretty raw, and requirements and features are still being fleshed out. I would love your input on further defining functionality and use cases.

The initial use case I wanted to do was to perform a basic QR login flow and share data with an application or another user. So, the flow would be like this:

• Application A creates a persona
• A creates a login page that renders a QR code
• User B creates a persona
• B navigates to A's login page
• In B's client, a dialog confirms that data is to be shared with A (and can specify which data fields to share)
• B confirms the transaction and data is stored in IPFS such that only A can access it
• A uses the blockchain to find the data and reads it from IPFS

More generally, the only use case supported right now is data sharing from one persona to another persona.

While I did not implement digital signatures, this works by storing any generic data in IPFS and uses Ethereum accounts, so digital signatures would be trivial to add. I'd also like to make this more blockchain platform agnostic and allow users to choose their storage infrastructure provider.

[dazzaji]

That sounds like a useful thing to do. Thank you for the explanation!

[dazzaji]

Thinking it through a little more ... I'm thinking about ways to run this code and set up an environment with the external account to try running through th scenario you wrote out. Some parts seem slightly daunting. Maybe this would be a good project for the upcoming "National Day of Civic Hacking" so I could potentially collaborate with of civic-minded people more hacky technically than myself. If you are aware of anybody interested to hack on this even just for purposes of getting it to "hello world" I'd be pleased to discuss possibly collaborating and sharing our notes or learning from the experience back here.

[miller46]

Yea, unfortunately I did not make this very user friendly at the moment, slightly daunting is an understatement. That sounds great though! The National Day of Civic Hacking is late September? That would really motivate me to get this to a more accessible and runnable state. It shouldn't take that much more work, and I can prioritize that over other things I wanted to add. It needs to be easier to run locally and also ideally I'd host the client and a test app somewhere to make that flow even easier to run through, or even possible to run through without installing anything.

[miller46]

@dazzaji a small update, I didn't quite make the deadline for the Day of Civic Hacking but this project is now in a much more presentable state and a demo version of the app is hosted publicly.

Digital Identity App: https://digital-identity-app.herokuapp.com/

Test application (for demo): https://identity-test-application.herokuapp.com/