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2019-10-07 Indy Contributors Call

2019-10-07 Indy Contributors Call

Oct 10, 2019

Summary

  • The future of consensus in Indy Node (moving from RBFT to Aardvark?)

  • Indy / Aries split

Timezone: US morning and Europe afternoon

We intend to record this call.

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Attendees

  • Name (organization) <email>

  • @Richard Esplin (Evernym) <richard.esplin@evernym.com>

  • @Sam Smith (ProSapien) <sam@samuelsmith.org>

  • @Nemanja Patrnogic  (Evernym) <nemanja.patrnogic@evernym.com>

Related Calls and Announcements

  • Previous Indy Contributors call

  • Identity Implementors Working Group call

    • Main place to get project updates, release status, and announcements.

  • Bootcamp Russia: Event Location

Release Status

  • Indy Node

    • September → Early October: 1.10.0

      • Refactoring for PBFT View Change  and BLS signature

      • Bug fixes (including new bug with GET_FEES and LibNullPay

      • Indy Node and Indy Plenum support for Ubuntu 18.04 is at risk for September

    • October: 1.11.0

      • PBFT view change

  • Indy SDK

    • September → Early October: 1.12.0

      • Fully qualified DIDs

      • Platform Updates: MacOS, CentOS

    • Future

      • GitLab migration alongside Jenkins (Foundation)?

      • Aries / Indy split: next step is aries-core-wallet

      • Anoncreds 2.0 (Sovrin Foundation, BC.gov?)

  • Indy Catalyst

    • Production deployment testing: volume loads.

    • Won't go live in production at BC.gov until October.

    • Not yet migrated to Hyperledger. Needs more documentation.

Work Updates

  • Documentation improvements: Michael B and Stephen C

    • Need to review and prune out-of-date documentation (Alice / Faber treatment of pairwise DIDs is a key pain point)

    • Michael is working on Indy Agent walkthrough using C#

    • Finishing work on ReadTheDocs (2 more weeks?)

    • Cloud Compass is building the Linux Foundation EdX courses for Indy and Aries

  • SDK 2.0 architecture / Indy-Aries split (Sergey)

  • CI / CD: GitLab migration (Mike and Steve G)

    • Demos in the Identity Implementers WG calls

    • Hyperledger is also evaluating Azure Pipelines

  • Advanced Schemas and W3C creds (Ken)

    • Can successfully write and retrieve the Context object from the node code. PR is merged.

    • 5 additional objects need to be added.

    • Currently making progress on HIPES, including updating the HIPE for the Context object.

    • Pull request for the Schema object is close.

      • github.com/burdettadam

  • Warnings from rust cargo clippy (Mike and Axel)

    • IS-1270 through IS-1274

  • New design for revocation / Anoncreds 2.0 (Mike)

  • Getting Ursa artifacts published that can be used by Indy Node and Indy SDK (Mike and Cam)

    • Ursa is now publishing python wrapper debian packages. Cam is unblocked.

Main Business

  • The future of consensus in Indy Node: proposal for moving from RBFT to Aardvark

    • During the implementation of PBFT View Change, we tested PBFT selection of View Change and it seemed to be much better.

    • Evaluating Aardvark versus fixing bugs with RBFT suggest that we should proceed to implement Aardvark.

    • Evernym is considering doing this in 2019, but has not made a decision.

    • Theoretical method growth in Ardvaark is n^2 instead of n^3 in RBFT.

    • In theory, view change for RBFT is faster than in Aardvark / PBFT because the nodes have more information stored in the shadow masters.

      • So there is a trade-off between faster view change versus faster throughput.

      • Under attack, RBFT is expected to have more consistent throughput than regular PBFT and Aardvark.

      • In practice, we would be using the same implementation of view change.

    • How often does view change happen in practice?

      • Under RBFT, view changes in the real world appear to be rare (days). It depends on the network conditions.

      • We can select the Aardvark performance threshold to have regular view changes with the frequency we would prefer, under good network conditions.

  • Update on Indy / Aries split

    • foundation's POC on threading is currently on-hold.

    • Adam has been looking at Rust parallelization / threading libraries. (See the Rocket framework for web servers for a good example.)

    • Handlers vs Futures vs async/waits

    • RFC for 37: Present Proof

      • Describes a new object for presentation previews. Fills a gap in LibIndy; interim solution until we have full blown W3C VCs.

    • Evernym thinks the next step is to move the Indy Wallet to Aries

  • As an Indy / Aries community, do we always have to wait for consensus on the details before people can contribute code?

Future Calls

  • Define pull request review process for Indy Node.

    • Should define the process, including how we handle exceptions (emergency fixes shouldn't be blocked, but would require notification)

    • What is important in a good review?

    • If a review must be skipped, should note it in the Git commit message.

  • Non-secrets in the Indy Wallet

    • Cam is working on pluggable crypto. They wallet shouldn't decide what encryption you should be using.

    • Use cases where we would want to move keys between wallets

      • Moving the link secret / credential data from one device to another (synchronized storage).

      • Debug use cases

      • Richard's hit other uses cases that were better solved with DID Doc,  pre-signing, signing API.

    • Work-around with the web-crypto API

Action items

HIPE #138, Issue #144 (Ken and Brent)

PR to RFC #0019 to compare pack/upack to msgpack (Sergey)
Richard and Sergey will close old pull requests with a descriptive comment.
Mike wants to review the 61 cases of "unsafe" libindy calls and figure out if they are justified.

Call Recording