idxdo

idxdo

idxdo is a CLI tool for interacting with IDX, an identity protocol for open applications.

Overview

IDX uses a decentralized index to hold records associated with a DID. The data are stored using Ceramic to allow structured data publishing and sharing, as well as other important properties such as access control and version control.

Interacting with the records in Ceramic is non-trivial --- there is no official web portal that you can go to to get all your records and look up others' records. What is more important is that, a decentralized system should allow any participant to verify and validate the records themselves. Because these records are owned by the participants of the system, anyone should be able to archive any record that are interesting to them and be able to prove its validity.

idxdo is a CLI tool that aims to reduce the complexity of interacting with IDX records, and provides an independent way to verify and validate published records. idxdo does not depend on any code or library from IDX or Ceramic projects.

Installation

Executing

$ go get github.com/phsiao/idxdo

would install the command idxdo in your $GOPATH/bin.

Usage

Example: Back up a Gitcoin Passport

Gitcoin Passport issues stamps for identities that they can verify about you, such as your Facebook user id, Gmail email address, and Twitter handle. Gitcoin then calculates Trust Bonus score from the stamps --- it would filter out stamps that share the same external identities with other Gitcoin Passports to mitigate obvious Sybil attacks.

The Passport document is stored in a Ceramic stream contains links to stamps that are in Verifiable Credential format. Your Passport document is linked from an IDX index that is created from your Ethereum address.

So knowing an Ethereum address would allow anyone to retrieve its Gitcoin Passport document if it has one. The document can then be backed up. You can also use it as a proof that you have identities that are verified by Gitcoin, and if the verifiers trust Gitcoin then they might be able to trust you to have those identities without asking you to prove it to them again. Note that the stamp does not reveal your identity in other community, just that you have an identity that Gitcoin was able to verify.

Gitcoin Passport data is composable because it allows other dapps to pull the stamps to verify your identity and derive a personhood score on their own.

Executing the command below would try to download and dump the Gitcoin Passport document to stdout. You can back up your Passport and inspect what stamps Gitcoin has issued to you.

$ idxdo gp dump --account <your etherum address starts with 0x...>

Example: Gitocin Passport data walk through

You can use idxdo to inspect IDX documents that are interesting to you, whether they belong to you or not, and who issued them. Below is an example of performing exploration using the functionalities provided by idxdo.

Get your IDX StreamID

Gitcoin Passport uses the PKH method for DID. So you first need to compute the IDX index StreamID for your DID.

$ idxdo idx id pkh --account 0x6C1e268Fd076B5EaD3774F26D65f21A21D369179
k2t6wyfsu4pg062qh6tvm5zkb3qe6e7i59s592zrl4knu0vb7ykz0s18g5i5pv

k2t6wyfsu4pg062qh6tvm5zkb3qe6e7i59s592zrl4knu0vb7ykz0s18g5i5pv is the IDX StreamID associated with account 0x6C1e268Fd076B5EaD3774F26D65f21A21D369179 using the PKH method. To get the IDX StreamID of the account that you are interested in, replace the --account argument with the account that you are interested in.

Different IDX streams can use different DID methods, for example, 3id and key are two other DID methods that are supported and used by other dapps as identity in IDX. idxdo currently only support PKH method but can be extended to support other methods.

Get your IDX Index

After you have your IDX index StreamID you can then get the IDX index document by executing

$ idxdo streamid state <your IDX StreamID from previous step>

Your IDX stream, represented by that IDX StreamID, contains metadata and history of its changes. These metadata allows access control and version control to take place in a decentralized environment.

You can authorize a dapp to make changes to your IDX stream on your behalf. For example, Gitcoin would ask you to sign a text using your wallet to grant it permission to change your Cermaic stream on your behalf to create passport document and insert stamps into it. You can read more about how it works here.

The content section of the json output is the list of your identity documents by their key/value pairs. The key kjzl6cwe1jw148h1e14jb5fkf55xmqhmyorp29r9cq356c7ou74ulowf8czjlzs is used to indicate that the linked document is a Gitcoin Passport associated with the identity.

The record value starts with ceramic:// to indicate that the linked document is stored in Ceramic.

Show your identity document

You can run

$ idxdo idx record <your IDX StreamID from previous step>

to go through the content of the index and let idxdo interpret what they are for you. Currently idxdo only interprets Gitcoin Passport documents.

Inspect CID, StreamID, and Stream State/Content

idxdo also has command to help you understand CID, StreamID, and inspect Stream state and its content. Use -h or --help to show usage at different category of the CLI.

Alternatives

cerscan by the Orbis team is a web application allowing you to query streams that they have indexed. It is also a very useful tool for learning about IDX, Ceramic, and Gitcoin Passport.