2019-10-28 Indy Contributors Call

Owned by Richard Esplin
Last updated: Oct 28, 2019
4 min read

Summary

  • The future of Indy Node
  • Pros and cons of Plenum versus other ledgers

Timezone: APAC Morning, US mid-day and Europe evening

We will be taking advantage of the staggered adoption of daylight savings time to have a call with additional Indy contributors. The Indy Contributors call will be on October 28 at 11AM US Pacific / 19H Central European Time / 21H Moscow Standard Time / 7H October 29 in New Zealand.
Zoom link is changed too: https://zoom.us/j/715671233

We intend to record this call.

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Introductions

Attendees

Related Calls and Announcements

  • Previous Indy Contributors call
  • Identity Implementors Working Group call
    • Main place to get project updates, release status, and announcements.

Release Status

  • Indy Node
    • October: 1.11.0
      • PBFT view change
    • November: 1.11.1
      • Bug fixes
  • Indy SDK
    • October: 1.12.1
      • Bug fixes
      • Might skip the release
    • November
      • ?
    • 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    • Need to review and prune out-of-date documentation (Alice / Faber treatment of pairwise DIDs is a key pain point)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)
    • Evernym: A PR with an example how the wallet can be separated; this is internal work
    • Kiva is working on a Futures implementation of threading (instead of call-backs)
  • CI / CD: GitLab migration (Mike and Steve G)
  • Advanced Schemas and W3C creds (Ken)
  • Warnings from rust cargo clippy (Mike and Axel)
    • Epic: IS-1410 
  • New design for revocation / Anoncreds 2.0 (Mike)
  • Replacing Indy-Crypto with Ursa in Indy Node (Mike and Cam)

Main Business

  • The future of consensus in Indy Node: proposal for moving from RBFT to Aardvark
    • Error rendering macro 'jira' : null
  • Remaining concerns with the current Indy Ledger
    • Lack of a diverse contributor community
      • Who is going to work on solutions?
    • Interpreted language (Python) is slower than a compiled language (Rust) 
    • Features from general purpose ledgers we would like
      • Observer nodes
      • Smart contracts
  • Strengths of Plenum
    • Battle tested
      • BFT with a 25 node pool and 10 write transactions per second (1000 reads)
    • Identity specific
    • BLS State Proofs
    • Pluggable ledgers
  • Next steps: dedicate an Indy Contributors call to the future of the ledger in early 2020.

Future Calls

  • Define the pull request review process for Indy Plenum/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?
    • Proposed Process (by Evernym team):
      • All Pull Requests can be reviewed by non-Evernym team members
      • Evernym team members will also do internal review in addition to external one
      • All interested parties are notified when a PR is sent
      • If a person wants to do an external review, he or she puts a comment or tag. This needs to be done in X hours.
      • Once a reviewer put a "want-to-review" tag, he or she need to finish review in Y hours
      • If no one wants to review a PR in X hours, or review is not finished in Y hours, we can do our internal review and merge the PR
      • An external review can be done against closed PRs as well, and Evernym team will process all findings ASAP
      • We may merge a PR with internal review only in case of urgency (critical fixes, release preparation etc.)
    • Items to be defined with the Community:
      1. A timeframe for external review (X):
        - X=12 hours, Y=2 days?
      2. What projects it should affect?
        - Plenum and Node?
        - Only Node?
        - We are not proposing SDK as it will be split to Aries in any case
      3. Who is going to commit to participate in this process?
  • Migration of Indy-SDK to Aries-Core
  • Requirements question: IS-1099, should we allow duplicate credentials from the same issuer?
  • 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