PyDentity: A playground for education and experimentation with the Hyperledger verifiable information exchange platform

Will Abramson,William J Buchanan,Nikolaos Pitropakis,Pavlos Papadopoulos

doi:10.1016/j.simpa.2021.100101

Abstract

<h2>Abstract</h2> PyDentity lowers the entry barrier for parties interested in experimenting with the Hyperledger's verifiable information exchange platform. It enables educators, developers and researchers to configure and initialise a set of actors easily as associated Hyperledger Aries agents. This allows them to focus on writing domain-specific business logic within a Jupyter notebook interface for each actor. Through this, actors can be customised to determine their connections with others, the messages they send, and how they respond to messages they received. This simple architecture allows for fast iteration and detailed exploration of the possible interactions and use cases that this platform supports. Additionally, notebooks can easily be made self-documenting and easily replicated by multiple parties. PyDentity has already been used in several research and education projects.

Highlights

PyDentity is an open-source project [1], developed within the OpenMined open-source community in order to create a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) framework that utilises attribute-based credentials [2]
Indy project [7] consists of two repositories: (i) Indy-node containing the code to run a node and contribute to consensus within an Indy-based distributed ledger network, and (ii) Indy-SDK providing an interface layer to interact with Indy ledgers, wallet storage and the relevant cryptographic protocols exposed by Ursa
Hyperledger Aries [8] defines and manages a set of specifications for the implemented agents to establish secure communication channels with other agents and exchange a series of messages associated with a specified protocol [9]

Summary

Introduction

PyDentity is an open-source project [1], developed within the OpenMined open-source community in order to create a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) framework that utilises attribute-based credentials [2]. This framework combines three open-source Hyperledger projects; Ursa, Indy and Aries. Hyperledger Aries [8] defines and manages a set of specifications for the implemented agents to establish secure communication channels with other agents and exchange a series of messages associated with a specified protocol [9]. Open-source code implementing these agents is being produced in a number of different programming languages, including Python, Go, .Net and JavaScript

Description

Impacts and future work