Identifi

http://identifi.org

IRC: #identifi on Freenode

Identifi & identifi-js in action: http://identi.fi

What

• Decentralized address book with ratings
• Web of trust
• API for integration with various trust or identity dependent applications
• Anyone can add identifiers and make statements about their relations to others
  • "[email protected] and http://facebook.com/user belong to the same owner"
  • "[email protected] and [email protected] are friends"
  • "[email protected] is expired" - keep online identity up to date
  • etc.
• Anyone can add reviews with their identity
  • "[email protected] says: I successfully traded with [email protected]"
• Credibility of statements can be evaluated by their author's reputation (history, social connections, identity verifications, reviews etc.)

Why

• Prevent spam (by accepting messages only from trusted / socially connected senders)
• Prevent astroturfing / sockpuppeting
• Makes it possible to trust people you have never met
  • Utilize your good reputation in various services and situations
  • Reduces risk of trade or loan, thus reducing price
• Ubiquitous reputation as non-violent, cost-effective and decentralized justice
  • Everyone can choose whose judgement or review to trust
  • Incentive against antisocial behavior
  • Incentive to restore trust by compensation and apology for misdeeds
• Facilitate gift economy / time banking
• Distributed public messaging, with trust lists instead of centralized moderator power
• Censorship-resistance
• Open database, vs. proprietary information silos of reputation and online identity
  • No monopoly on credit ratings

How

• Prototype built on Bitcoin code to utilize existing crypto, network, CLI, etc. functions (but not blockchain)
• Data package: [author identifiers, recipient identifiers, message][signatures]
  • Identified by content hash
  • Signed by the entity which verified that the message originates from the named author. Thus, all end users need not to have a crypto key of their own.
• Flood packages throughout the network
  • Nodes maintain their own trust graphs which are updated as new messages arrive
  • Message storage priority is based on its author's and signer's position in the node's web of trust
  • Later on, connections to other nodes can be prioritized by trust
• Crawl initial data from existing social networks and review systems

Possible applications

• Facial recognition and identifi-cation with Google glass or similar
  • Thumbs up to the friendly bus driver, policeman or the stranger who helped you
• Mywot.com-style browser plugin for website reviews
• Bitcoin UIs, connect addresses to identities or vice versa
• Email plugin
  • Generate trusted senders list from email history
  • Require new senders to be on identifi - send automatic response if not
• Decentralized marketplaces, P2P trade and finance
  • Check escrow or trader reputation
  • Airbnb, eBay, Uber, LocalBitcoins etc.
  • Time banking, gift economy
• Uncensored and sockpuppet-resistant reviews and recommendations for products, restaurants etc.
• Public messaging, automatically show or hide authors
• Social network based routing protocols
• Decentralized alternative to DNS - let your WoT decide which IP a name maps to

Building

sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libboost-all-dev libminiupnpc-dev

You'll also need sqlite3 version 3.8.3 or later: http://www.sqlite.org/download.html (users with existing sqlite package may need to configure sqlite3 with --disable-dynamic-extensions --enable-static).

git clone git://github.com/identifi/identifi.git
cd ./identifi/src
make -f makefile.unix

Other makefiles have not been tested.

Developing

Core functionality of the implementation is in identifidb.cpp, data.cpp and rpcdb.cpp.

Get the daemon running with ./identifi -daemon. Call the JSON-RPC with ./identifi rpccommand. Rpc_tests.cpp shows how to use the RPC.

The program connects to seed nodes from DNS by default and requests for messages created after a certain timestamp. Identifi developers' ECDSA pubkey is included and trusted by default as an entry point to the WoT. You need to connect your own pubkey or other identifiers to the WoT if you want your messages prioritized over spam by other nodes.

The default database size limit 2 GB. Add saveuntrustedmsgs=1 to DATADIR/identifi.conf to allow messages from outside your WoT for testing.

Sqlite Manager is a nice Firefox plugin for debugging DATADIR/db.sqlite.

License

Identifi is released under the terms of the MIT license. See COPYING for more information or see http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT.

Data format

Suggested data format for Identifi messages:

{
    "signature": {
      "pubKey": "PA4oX2htY38kXuNVnvNxXHiSiafcfJJyxJntwfgx7tgisjVbuEZcb1v3V2dojuHkrRyfVNu9Xi24nFcSPEdEvLeN",
      "signature": "AN1rKpVZvbBCZBcpTMyT9eaEsby8gRoYeNwkf8osYHQKLddPiFaYgiyME1ZKKzkgJRutxzQA5R6FLGCy5rJYWZZ67egTRnXot"
    },
    "signedData": {
      "author": [
        [
          "keyID",
          "1DqrzTcimQp3Ye88oHgxdU7DBTsM2TRYFj"
        ]
      ],
      "comment": "Identifi developers' key, trusted by default",
      "maxRating": 1,
      "minRating": -1,
      "rating": 1,
      "recipient": [
        [
          "keyID",
          "147cQZJ7Bd4ErnVYZahLfCaecJVkJVvqBP"
        ],
        [
          "nickname",
          "Identifi dev key 1"
        ]
      ],
      "timestamp": 1409307849,
      "type": "rating"
    }
}

SignedData may optionally contain additional fields.

Messages are digitally signed by the entity that verifies that the message originated from the claimed sender. For example, this could be a website where the sender logged in with a Facebook account, or a crawler that read the sender's message from Twitter.

Message encoding is UTF-8.

Future considerations

Browser plugin & mobile app

Query messages from peers by trust viewpoint? "Send me the trust tree from [ID] with messages after [timestamp] as leaves." Would help counter spam and irrelevant content.

Use Trsst for data propagation and storage?

Use Whanau DHT for distributed storage and retrieval?

Freenet as data storage? Saving data is trivial, but efficient indexing needs some effort.

ArangoDB graph database? Could enable on-demand trust path finding and eliminate the need for caching them.

Use GPGME to integrate with PGP web of trust? Could provide a nice entry point into the Identifi WoT for many people.