Decentralized Identity

A DID (standing for Decentralized Identifier) is a new type of identifier for verifiable, decentralized digital identity.

Digital identity has always been a key aspect of Internet interactions. The second wave of Web technology (the now dying, so-called Web 2.0), brought tremendous innovations, but it has failed to give netizens of the world a true sense of control over their digital identity, leaving us in the current state: weak control over our digital identities, and no control over what we publish. The dweb has the potential to fix the power imbalance of the old client-server paradigm.

Enter IPID

InterPlanetary Identifiers (see IPID) are a type of decentralized identifiers (DID) that live in the IPFS ecosystem (the DID document associated with an IPID identifier is stored as a DAG in your IPFS repository).

The identifier of your IPID is an IPNS key, which always points to the latest version of the DID document DAG (your latest identity). This is an example of an IPID identifier:

did:ipid:QmSK1moUFX4k6JdmjgSWxCicZ4TMQ87oq2m9frNZo6TadQ

(DIDs always follow the format did:method-name:method-specific-id, inf our case method-name is ipid and the method-specific-id is the IPNS key associated with our IPID).

By using IPIDs you have immense control over your digital identities: your identity is backed by a crypto-based Merkle tree stored on your system.

Implementation and goals

Note: IPID is still a recent, subject-to-changes DID specification

In the 0.4 branch of galacteek the IPID implementation is still in its early stages and there will be probable changes in the IPID schema, until stabilization at the end of the 0.4 branch cycle (at version 0.4.42).

Some of the goals in the UI are:

• Connection-state independence over resolvability of the identities (even offline, you should be able to manage your contacts).

• Easy way to publish services (could be anything from a link to a document to a restricted chat or video service ..)

• “Muted” identities

IP Profile

Your profile in galacteek can have as many decentralized identities attached to it as you like.

Each identity is represented by an IP handle (Space handle) and a DID:

noname#156@Mars/QmXcBFXy5XA5qELL8Z8GeJdeD9LWa2cWVVnkStK6Jxtvas
dwebartist@Earth/QmVrLyye1bByJT3ktj9gRFvxibBVpxk7vXvcwEXF9hhdku

InterPlanetary services

You can publish services (they can be simple IPFS links, or P2P services) on your DID.

An IP service attached to an IPID has a DID URL, for example:

did:ipid:QmXcBFXy5XA5qELL8Z8GeJdeD9LWa2cWVVnkStK6Jxtvas/blog

From the Peers workspace you can browse the DID services for each authenticated peer.

Creating DID services

From the profile menu you can create new services. Click on the helmet and go to the IP services menu.

Object collections service

This type of service is a simple container of IPFS files. You can publish files to a collection from the filemanager.

HTTP forwarding service

This DID service allows you to serve an existing HTTP website over IPFS (via libp2p tunnels). It will be accessible through the ipfs+http protocol. The ipfs+http protocol doesn’t use domain names, but base36-encoded IPFS PeerIDs (this makes it pretty secure, as there is no DNS resolving involved, the URL origin being the PeerID which is dialed directly through IPFS).

From the menu select Add HTTP forward service. The dialog form will ask you for the IP address and listening port of the HTTP website you want to use. The public TCP port (by default 80) is the port number for the ipfs+http DID service, and is included in the URL. This means that you can serve as many websites as you want on a single IPFS node, by using different public ports.

For more infos on the ipfs+http protocol, look at the Browsing section.