Self-Sovereign Identity development experts Tangle Labs have just released the latest version of their open-source Identity Manager libraries that provide accessible development tools for businesses and organisations to create anything with Identity.
Making use of the IOTA Identity protocols that are live on the main network of the IOTA DLT, Identity Manager provides a developer friendly environment with additional features that can get enterprise developers exploring Identity in minutes. Abstracting away from the intricate functionality of identity, the tooling provides full exposure of the features in a simplified manner.
Get Up & Running With SSI in 15mins!
Why Do We Need Identity Manager?
Self-Sovereign Identity is becoming a clear topic of discussion at the highest levels of international governments and organisations, yet the current technological barriers to entry provide numerous challenges for SMEs, Institutions, and Enterprises, when entering into the space. As an open-source library, Identity Manager provides developers and teams with and accessible developer tool kit with countless additional features that can support enterprise use-cases and real world deployment of Self-Sovereign Identity solutions.
A fundamental part of all Tangle Labs products the Identity Manager was developed to make identity more comprehensive and approachable for more casual developers and teams working with SSI, without the need to dive in too deep. Making use of sane defaults and helper functions to support quick and versatile deployments and application development. The initial development was specifically to help support the work on the SSI powered Tixit applications, after realising that Identity protocols can be overwhelming for the majority of developers who are not too familiar with its concepts.
By producing an accessible, open-source wrapper library, Tangle Labs provides any business or development team the opportunity to easily explore SSI and to test and prototype solutions that can bring added value to your business. With an increasing interest in the future of identity online, and with SSI being at the forefront of research for major institutions and organisations, Identity Manager provides the opportunity for any business to get ahead of the game in developing novel identity solutions specific to your use-case.
What is Self-Sovereign Identity?
In the sharing of digital data, SSI fosters trust. The user has discretion over what information, including personal information, is shared and with whom. For instance, the recipient can rapidly check the legality and authenticity of shared information electronically. For this, cryptographic tools like public-key cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, and distributed ledger technologies are used. This makes it possible for parties who do not naturally trust each other to share verified digital information quickly and with a high level of trust.
Governments & Businesses Save Money & Time
Data sharing is now safer, simpler, and more dependable thanks to SSI. This benefits not only consumers but also businesses and government agencies. Companies can more easily abide by the eIDAS2 rule and the European Union’s GDPR thanks to SSI. Additionally, they spend less time and money. The requirement to review documents on paper is no longer necessary, saving billions of euros in administrative expenses, in addition, quicker and better decision-making results in higher customer satisfaction.
How Does Identity Manager Improve Developer Experiences?
With numerous levels of complexity within the IOTA Identity libraries, getting started can be a daunting task. Where Identity Manager helps is in its abstracting away the complexity of certain features through standard, customisable, defaults, to present developers with a more manageable Typescript environment to promote faster and easier development processes.
What Value Does Identity Manager Bring to Business?
With such bodies as the European Commission, British Government, US Government, and other institutions and organisations actively researching and developing SSI based solutions, it is only a matter of time before the use of Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) become common practise. In a world where development is fast paced and in many cases expensive, the Identity Manager provides a serious entry point into the technology without the complexities of extensive development processes and specialist developer requirements. Helping businesses explore the boundaries of the tech with ease and short timeframes.
How Does Identity Manager Expand Upon the IOTA Identity Protocol?
Having one of the most complex decentralised identity libraries around, the IOTA Identity protocol can be a challenge to navigate, and whilst it focuses on a number of core principals and feature sets to support extensive versatility in the use and deployment of SSI solutions, there are a few areas out of scope, that have been integrated into the Identity Manager to support real world use cases.
Additional features include:
DVID – Domain Verifiable Identity, making use of DNS and inspired by DKIM, DVID allows a verifiable credential to be signed and verified not only through its issuers DID, but also through its issuer’s domain through the use of DNS connected DID. Providing a built in human identifiable verification process.
Storage Interface – Through the addition of a storage interface, Identity Manager can easily allow developers to quickly adapt the technology to any data storage paradigm, allowing for ease of management of your identity and credentials through the built in MongoDB or File System solutions, or through any number of additional data storage options such as Postgress, SQL, Cassandra, etc.
Credential Encryption – There are currently no suggested guidelines for the encryption of data in the IOTA Identity protocols, which has been included in the Identity Manager toolkit. Ensuring an identity is fully supported with encrypted credential storage accessible through ownership DID key access. Supporting users with safe storage of their PII only accessible through your private key.
Backup & Restore – A big concern when it comes to identity is backing up and restoration of data when something goes wrong. You break a phone, your laptop burns out, any number of things can add to the loss of data. Identity Manager supports easy user backup and restoration for peace of mind, allowing identity holders to safely be able to restore identity configurations, credentials, keys, and more.
Typescript Library – Without the need to delve into low level Rust code, the Identity Manager libraries have been developed in Typescript to provide an accessible developer entry point to SSI through fully documented code that offers an easy access point to the technology for any development team.
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How to Get Started.
You can find the full repo live on Github
Identity Manager is published on NPM and can be easily installed using
$ yarn add @tanglelabs/identity-manageror
npm install @tanglelabs/identity-managera few examples can be found in the examples folder along with the fully detailed API Reference
Identity Manager uses IOTA Identity’s Stronghold bindings to securely store your keypair. The manager instance handles everything related to Stronghold and secrets while the IdentityAccount which is returned with loading or creating a DID handles everything related to a DID and credentials.
Here is an example for how to create an identity using IdentityManager.
import { IdentityManager } from "@tanglelabs/identity-manager";async function run() { // Instantiate a new instance of Identity Manager const manager = IdentityManager.newInstance({ filepath: process.env.FILEPATH, password: process.env.PASSWORD, }); // Create a did with the alias of `identity-alias` const did = await manager.createDid("identity-alias");}run();
Please note:
Identity Manager v0.2.0 is an alpha release and has not undergone any professional audit or security evaluation. It is meant to be used as an entry point into the technology and is released as is. Please use at your own discretion and not in a real world scenario.
