SDK example project

This project is a sandbox application made to showcase how to implement end-2-end encryption in a web application with the Seald-SDK.

The full documentation is available here.

This project consists in 6 consecutive branches, each with a dedicated guide to go from one step to the next:

Step	Description	Final result	Root branch
Quick-start	Basic integration of the Seald-SDK with password protection	1-quick-start	master
Password pre-derivation	Implements a pre-derivation of the authentication password	2-pre-derivation	1-quick-start
Cache the identity in localStorage	Implements identity caching in the localstorage	3-localstorage	2-pre-derivation
Protection with 2-man-rule	Replacement of password protection with a protection with 2-man-rule	4-two-man-rule	3-localstorage
Using 2-man-rule with SMS	In 2-man-rule, changing email protection to SMS protection	5-two-man-rule-sms	4-two-man-rule

Features

This project allows to:

• create an account (e-mail address, name, password);
• log in (e-mail address & password);
• create chat rooms;
• add & remove users from a chat room;
• delete chat rooms;
• send messages to rooms;
• notify recipients when a new message arrives;
• retrieve messages from rooms;
• upload files and attach them to a message;
• retrieve files;

Architecture

The architecture is basic (though some would say it is overkill for a demo project):

• backend:
  • REST API implemented with Express and csurf, session, body-parser, cookie-parser middlewares;
  • websockets implemented with socket.io;
  • SQLite database with Sequelize;
• frontend:
  • React app created with the official tool;
  • @material-ui/ for most of the components;
  • bare fetch as the REST API client and socket.io-client as the websocket client.

Starting the project

Development server

To start working on the project, you need to:

• install dependencies;
• set up the settings and environment variables (which vary from one branch to the other);
• start the development servers (which both have a watch feature).

On the backend, it opens a server on port 4000:

cd backend
npm install
npm start

On the frontend, it opens a server on port 5173:

cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev

Docker setup

Then you can start the project with following command:

docker-compose up -d --build

It will build the frontend and serve it with nginx on http://localhost which will act as a reverse proxy for the backend.

Settings

Frontend

Settings of the frontend must be set in a settings.json file, located in the root directory of the webserver (volume /usr/share/nginx/html/settings.json if used with provided docker-compose.yml file)

There is a settings.example.json in each branch which is a template of the settings.json you can copy & paste, you'll need to replace the values with the actual settings.

The following settings must be set:

Settings	Description	Must be set in branches
APPLICATION_SALT	Salt used for pre-derivation	2-pre-derivation, 3-localstorage
APP_ID	App ID	All
API_URL	Seald API URL	All
KEY_STORAGE_URL	SSKS API URL	4-two-man-rule, 5-two-man-rule-sms

Warning: Do not set settings if they are not required in the branch you run, otherwise there may be side effects.

Backend

Settings of the backend must be set in a settings.json file; located in the root of the backend directory (volume /backend/settings.json if used with provided docker-compose.yml file)

There is a settings.example.json in each branch which is a template of the settings.json you can copy & paste, you'll need to replace the values with the actual settings.

The following settings must be set:

Settings	Description	Must be set in branches
HTTPS_ENABLED	Must be enabled if a reverse proxy implements HTTPS upstream of the server. The Secure attribute will be added to session cookies and Express will trust the X-Forwarded-* headers	All
SESSION_SECRET	Secret used to derive session cookies	All
JWT_SHARED_SECRET_ID	JWT shared secret ID (for signup JWT)	All
JWT_SHARED_SECRET	JWT shared secret (for signup JWT)	All
APP_ID	App ID (for user licence & SSKS)	All
KEY_STORAGE_URL	API URL (for SSKS)	4-two-man-rule, 5-two-man-rule-sms
KEY_STORAGE_APP_KEY	App Key (for SSKS)	4-two-man-rule, 5-two-man-rule-sms

Warning: Do not set settings if they are not required in the branch you run, otherwise there may be side effects.

In addition, in production, you may want to set the NODE_ENV environment variable to "production", to run the express webserver in production mode.