Document Attestation Service

[mitchellolsthoorn]

Introduction

Some of the more important concepts:

Overlay network (called community in our implementation): A network of computers working together for a specific purpose (for example signing documents)
Trustchain: Our blockchain implementation.
IPV8: Our abstraction layer for writing overlay networks that handles all the cryptographic functionality and network communication. It also allows multiple overlay networks to be run on a single port.
Peer: a node/computer in the overlay network
Walker: Strategies to determine which nodes are directly connected to you in the network graph
Network graph: A way to represent the overlay network, where peers are circles and the connections between peers are lines between the corresponding circles. This can both be used for visualization and as a data structure
Lamport clock: Global incrementer in distributed networks used as an example in the tutorial
Reactor: Major network component of one of the dependencies of IPV8
I gave them some links to documentation of the different components that would be related to the project:
https://github.com/Tribler/py-ipv8/blob/master/doc/overlay_tutorial.md
https://github.com/Tribler/py-ipv8/blob/master/doc/attestation_tutorial.md

Both of these resources use git submodules to install the ipv8 library, which can be quite hard to work with. So I would suggest you install the library through pip with the following command:

pip install pyipv8

This will also install all its requirements.

Because the library is now installed differently the tutorial needs to be changed a little. Everything you see an import statement like this:

from pyipv8.ipv8_service

That starts with pyipv8, you can remove the first part like:

from ipv8_service

Objective is a working demo of a trusted elektronic document signature through a third-party (in this case a notary).

An example of a centralised variant of this is: Ondertekenen.nl

To accomplish that the following steps are necessary:

• Represent the document with an identifier based on its contents (hashing can be used for this).
• Sign the identifier with your cryptographic key as a signature.
• Request the notary to verify (cryptographically sign/attest to) your signature, to make the signature trustworthy.
• Transfer the document to the notary.
• Let others check that this signature is valid and trusted.
• Create an interface to let users initiate these actions.

[mitchellolsthoorn]

Meeting minutes 15-3

We discussed the progress on getting the tutorials to run on their own computers. Some of the problems that were encountered:

• Not changing the identifiers that were used as an example in the tutorial
• Undocumented behaviour that the attribute can be seen on both sides of the transaction, because of how it is implemented.

Plan for current sprint:

• Implement the sequence of actions that the tutorial explains in code instead of executing them manually
• Create a web GUI to initiate these actions using e.g. Angular or another platform.

Next sprints:

• Implementing a document transfer mechanism
  • Through libtorrent
  • Through IPFS
  • Through directly connecting to the notary peers (start with this approach)
  • Through an encrypted tunnel
• Implement a IPV8 overlay and a Twisted plugin