walytis-identities 0.6.0

A system for managing identities, contacts and their cryptographic keys based on the Walytis blockchain.

Walytis Identity

P2P multi-controller cryptographic identity management, based on the Walytis blockchain.

Walytis is a peer-to-peer cryptographic identity management system that supports multiple controllers per identity.

The purpose of this system is to enable secure communications between distributed identities in peer-to-peer networks, which means:

• encrypting messages so that they can be decrypted only by a specific identity
• verifying the authenticity of received messages, ensuring they were authored by a specific identity

To achieve this goal in a sustainably secure fashion, WalytisIdentities' core task lies in managing the ephemeral cryptographic keys belonging to digital identities:

• it automatically renews keys at regular intervals
• it publishes the new public keys in a verifiable manner
• it securely distributes the private keys to all controllers of the identity

Features

• fully peer-to-peer: no servers of any kind involved
• multi-controller support: a Walytis Identity can be managed by any number of controllers
• identity nesting: Walytis Identities can be controlled by other Walytis Identities
• secure data transmission
• cryptography:
  • key rotation
  • hybrid cryptography combining classical and post-quantum algorithms
  • cryptographic agility (upgradable to novel algorithms)
  • perfect forward and backward secrecy for transmissions

See Related Projects if this isn't quite what you're looking for!

Use cases

WalytisIdentities was developed to empower developers to build peer-to-peer distributed applications that require secure communications between digital identities. A classic example of such a use case is a peer-to-peer messenger, which is being developed in the Endra Project.

Underlying Technologies

• Walytis Database-Blockchain: a blockchain that serves as a p2p distributed database
• IPFS: the peer-to-peer network layer which Walytis is built on

DID Compatibility

WalytisIdentities implements the World-Wide-Web-Consoritum's (W3C's) Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) specifications.

In the context of W3C's DID architecture, walytis_identities is a DID method, meaning that walytis_identities is a system for creating DIDs and managing DID-Documents. walytis_identities achieves this using the Walytis blockchain.

Basic Functionality

• A Walytis identity is served by a Walytis blockchain.
• The blockchain is used to publish DID-documents, which contain cryptographic public keys.
• Other parties can join a walytis_identities identity's blockchain, get the currently valid DID document, and use the cryptographic keys therein for authentication and encryption when communicating with that identity.

URI specs: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986

Documentation

The thorough documentation for this project and the technologies it's based on live in a dedicated repository:

• WalytisIdentities: learn how WalytisIdentities works
• Walytis Technologies: learn about the suite of tools which WalytisIdentities is part of, built to enable developers to easily develop peer-to-peer distributed applications.

Project Status EXPERIMENTAL

This library is very early in its development.

The API of this library IS LIKELY TO CHANGE in the near future!

RoadMap

See the Walytis Technologies RoadMap for the current plans for WalytisIdentities in the context of the larger Walytis Technologies Project.

Contributing

Get Involved

• GitHub Discussions: if you want to share ideas
• GitHub Issues: if you find bugs, other issues, or would like to submit feature requests
• GitHub Merge Requests: if you think you know what you're doing, you're very welcome!

Donate

To support me in my work on this and other projects, you can make donations with the following currencies:

• Bitcoin: BC1Q45QEE6YTNGRC5TSZ42ZL3MWV8798ZEF70H2DG0
• Ethereum: 0xA32C3bBC2106C986317f202B3aa8eBc3063323D4
• Credit Card, Debit Card, Bank Transfer, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Revolut Pay)

Donations help me:

• dedicate more time to developing and maintaining open-source projects
• cover costs for IT resources

About the Developer

This project is developed by a human one-man team, publishing under the name Emendir.
I build open technologies trying to improve our world; learning, working and sharing under the principle:

Freely I have received, freely I give.

Feel welcome to join in with code contributions, discussions, ideas and more!

Open-Source in the Public Domain

I dedicate this project to the public domain. It is open source and free to use, share, modify, and build upon without restrictions or conditions.

I make no patent or trademark claims over this project.

Formally, you may use this project under either the:

• MIT No Attribution (MIT-0) or
• Creative Commons Zero (CC0) licence at your choice.

Related Projects

Walytis Technologies

An overarching project comprising the development of Walytis and a collection of tools based on it for real-world peer-to-peer communications.

• Walytis: A flexible, lightweight, nonlinear database-blockchain, built on IPFS.
• WalytisIdentities: P2P multi-controller cryptographic identity management, built on Walytis.
• WalytisOffchain: Secure access-controlled database-blockchain, built on WalytisIdentities.
• WalytisMutability: A Walytis blockchain overlay featuring block mutability.
• Endra: A P2P encrypted messaging protocol with multiple devices per user, built on Walytis.
• EndraApp: A P2P encrypted messenger supporting multiple devices per user, built on Walytis.

IPFS

A P2P communication and content addressing protocol developed by Protocol Labs. This is the networking foundation which Walytis builds upon.

Alternative Technologies

• OrbitDB: a distributed IPFS-based database written in go