2019-10-07 Indy Contributors Call

Owned by Richard Esplin
Last updated: 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

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    • Need to review and prune out-of-date documentation (Alice / Faber treatment of pairwise DIDs is a key pain point)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)
    • Create a PR for changing status to ACCEPTED
    • Check for an Aries RFC
  • 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