Identity Check-In: Agendas and Notes

Community Calls Identity Check-In
1

When: Daily until March 22nd

Tracking Issues:

None, yet

Mar 19, 2024

  • [Rich] - Deciding between one-way and two-way associations, including the decision in the XIP.
  • [Cameron] - Looking at the UX descriptions for users and devs for offchain
  • [Tong] - Looking at how much additional work does this add to decentralization
  • [Andrew] - UX descriptions, looking for feedback on multiple wallet flow for onchain
  • [Nick] - Migration plans

Agenda:

  • Plan to make that decision at tomorrows meeting. What criteria are we using?

    • What’s going to be easiest for us to implement now?
    • How much additional work does this add to decentralization?
    • Migration difficulty?
    • What’s the best for users?
    • What’s the best for developers?
    • Visibility and analytics
    • Cost and risk

  • What other information do we need to make a decision between onchain and offchain?

    • We need to make some smaller decisions between alternatives on each of these proposals to agree on the best possible version of each
    • Technical risk of time-travel @Nick
    • UX description for users @Andrew
    • UX description for developers @Andrew

  • DRI for consolidating all these documents into a coherent XIP for Friday

  • Check in

  • One-way vs two-way

    • Potential for embarrassing ENS names to be associated with strangers
    • We might need a coordination layer anyways for message history
3 Likes
2

Mar 20, 2024

Agenda:

  • Review Team Offchain XIP
  • Review Team Onchain XIP
  • Compare two approaches based on previously defined criteria

    • Security and trust model

      • Offchain might actually be better for EOAs. More trust given to XMTP node to verify the list of identities in onchain.

    • What’s going to be easiest for us to implement now?

      • Multiple forms of sybil resistance in onchain are additional work for us
      • Onchain is simpler at the time of credential verification
      • Sybil resistance is going to be hard. Need to build a whole new set of services around
        these, and maintain availability of them
      • Smart contracts are scary and updates are difficult
      • Audits are expensive and time-consuming
      • Offchain requires more backend work now, and more work to synchronize the registry in a decentralized network
      • Offchain relies heavily on the availability of archive nodes. Onchain only has optional use of an archive node

    • How much additional work does this add to decentralization?

      • Offchain requires new synchronization mechanisms
      • Onchain de-risks decentralization because identity will have independent uptime of XMTP nodes
      • Onchain helps with decentralization narrative. Faster to decentralize and
      • Decentralizing the sybil resistance service will be difficult
      • Having decentralized partners who don’t use subsidized gateway would be a worse experience. But not all partners may want to either subsidize or use our subsidy service

    • Migration difficulty?

      • Offchain can work with existing XMTP identities
      • Onchain is going to be more difficult and costly

    • What’s the best for users?

      • Migration path for existing users is easier in offchain
      • Phone number verification is a new form of friction for onchain
      • 3 signatures for new users until we deprecate V2 fully for onchain
      • Potential privacy impact of phone number verification for onchain
      • A lot of explaining around phone number verification for onchain
      • Have to be on the right chain for SCWs in onchain. Chain agnostic for offchain

    • What’s the best for developers?

      • Onchain is a more familiar set of primitives
      • Latency shouldn’t be a huge difference
      • Both should be cacheable
      • Phone number verification is new work for devs
      • Getting block height in the offchain flow is new work for devs
      • Supporting multi-chain is complicated in onchain solution
      • Public API

    • Visibility and analytics

      • Onchain

    • Cost and risk

      • Offchain is lower risk
  • Decide which path to go down
3

March 21, 2024

Agenda:

  • Association loose-ends
  • Ideas around improved visibility and analytics
  • Ideas around sybil resistance and slowing down identity registration
  • Next steps for wrapping up the XIP
4

March 22, 2024

Agenda:

  • XIDs and associations
  • Sequencing of work for next week
5

March 26, 2024

Agenda

  • Standup
  • XID unresolved questions
    • State sync with MLS.
      • Using epochs to sync group state
      • What happens if there are gaps in the epoch history?
      • Next steps: define the message types for synchronization/revocation messages
    • Moving wallets
      • Is this one step or two steps?
      • What is the worst-case scenario around migrations?
    • Signer

Standup

  • [Andrew] Been working on the traits for credential verification in libxmtp. Set up the new identity crate. Working through a refactor of legacy and EOA.
  • [Tong] Working on the Smart Wallet verification. Testing against Coinbase Smart Wallet.
  • [Rich] Focusing on the unresolved XID questions. What happens if you don’t change the installation keys.
  • [Nick] Writing some of the tickets for the project. Moving to code-writing today (hopefully)
6

Agenda

Standup

  • [Andrew] Still working through the credential traits
  • [Tong] Working on smart wallet. Deployed the wallet. Currently working on figuring out logic for signature verification. Working towards a short demo. Need to figure out how to change the owner so we can test those changes.
  • [Rich] Ironing out the UX with Converse and Saul. Some things Converse would like, but we currently can’t do. Cannot roll out multi-wallet on V2. Looked into wallet moving flow. Wipe message history on your current device and re-associate, other devices will all get logged out.
  • [Nick] Working out MLS state resolution and new APIs.
7

April 2, 2024

Agenda

  • Standup
  • For the Rust service: is it going to be on the client side or the server? The answer is likely both. We will support on the client, but offer a service to do those requests on client’s behalf. Both should be able to be implemented with the CredentialVerifier trait.

Standup

  • [Andrew] Just finished the scaffolding/trait PR. Reviewing the SCW PR. Was reviewing the smart contract PR. Working on issue 599 next.
  • [Tong] Smart Wallet PR is up. Responding to PR feedback to use 1271 interface. Next up is integration tests for key rotation.
  • [Rich]
  • [Nick] Working through backend design for XID, and how it interacts with the client. Toy implementation
8

April 4, 2024

Agenda

  • Standup
  • Questions around smart wallet or EOA
    • Are we always sure a signer is going to have an address? Yes
    • The only good way for checking if it’s a smart contract wallet or an EOA is checking the code size.
    • Does the app developer always know if they’re dealing with a smart wallet or a regular wallet?
  • Open questions for Multi-Wallet XIP
  • Review Universal Identity KR tasks

Standup

  • [Andrew] Working on the Smart Wallet or EOA interface
  • [Tong] Finished the integration tests, except for the part about the block tolerance. Will follow-up with some questions
  • [Rich] Working on the protos and the XIP
  • [Nick] Working on toy implementation of the IdentityUpdate validation work.
9

April 9, 2024

Agenda

  • Review the tracking issue
  • Standup
  • Priorities between the two tracking issues

Standup

  • [Rich] Final touches on the XIP. Protos are merged. The XIP can likely be published today, then working on the identity backend.
  • [Tong] Working on the signature verification issue.
  • [Andrew] Reviewed all the PRs and the Notion doc. Getting the SCW vs EOA interface merged
  • [Nick] Working on updates to the batch
10

April 11, 2024

Agenda

  • Standup
  • What belongs in xmtp_id and what belongs in xmtp_mls
    • Credential should live in xmtp_id
    • "If it talks to the nodes or it talks to the database, it belongs in xmtp_mls. All the stateless stuff belongs in xmtp_id. We may need a third crate that holds all the constants.

Standup

  • [Tong] Continued working on key recovery. Need to figure out installation key recovery, and connect the dots on Legacy Keys
  • [Rich] Landed some stubs for the identity backend. Working on the database schema. First step, write the identity updates to the DB without validation.
  • [Nick] Checked off a bunch of small items (API Client, Database Schema)
  • [Andrew] Association state API for the Validation Service. PRs should be going up soon
11

April 16, 2024

Agenda

  • Review the tracking issue
  • Standup
  • Discuss how MLS Validation service will work with the backend

Standup

  • [Nick] Working on MLS commit validation, which involves plumbing together a bunch of different pieces
  • [Tong] Breaking down the signature verification work into smaller PRs.
  • [Rich] Landed the database schema and algorithm. Implementing the DB operations.
  • [Andrew] Working on MLS validation service. Got some PR feedback
12

April 18, 2024

Agenda

  • Standup
  • Next week’s demo

Standup

  • [Tong] Almost finished the set of signers. Will put up a draft PR to review some of the interface changes
  • [Andrew] Hopefully the MLS API PR will get merged in today.
  • [Rich] Implemented the publish endpoint. Stubbed out the validation for now. Written fetching the identity log.
  • [Nick] Working on a bunch of utility methods for building Association State
13

April 23, 2024

Agenda

  • Standup
  • Demo TODO items
    • Create inbox with a wallet
    • Add a smart wallet
    • Update recovery wallet
    • Remove a wallet
    • Smart wallet with passkey
  • Configuring RPC URLs
    • We will need to add a client creation argument for the RPC URL provider, so that apps can configure what node provider our SDK verifies signatures against. As a “should have” we can have an API that does the signature verification for devs on our Alchemy account.

Standup

  • [Nick] Working on removing blockers to demoing creating identities. Will hand off some of the outstanding backend work to Rich.
  • [Andrew] Working out how we’re going to interact with the existing identity stuff in xmtp_mls
  • [Tong] Signature verification PR is up. Working on putting some validation logic inside recoverSigner
14

April 25, 2024

Agenda

  • Standup
  • Demo check-in. What can we do to make the demo “more real”
  • Integration with xmtp_mls

Standup

  • [Andrew] Spent the day in Go working on PublishIdentityUpdate and writing SQL for GetAddressLog
  • [Tong] wrapped up signature verification - out Wed - reviewed PRs. Would like to take #674, #675. (create / validate credentials with inbox_id)
  • [Nick] Working on CLI methods for creating/updating
15

April 30, 2024

Agenda

  • Standup
  • Demo this Friday?
    • Going to demo client creation
  • Key package publishing and credentials. How do we want to support both old and new style credentials on the backend

Standup

  • [Nick] Working on commit validation. Trying to get a PR together morning.
  • [Andrew] Working on credential validation. Has some questions strategy-wise.
  • [Tong] working on IdentityStrategy - created a new db table for new identity struct (do we need a nonce col?)
16

May 2, 2024

Agenda

  • Standup
  • Demo?

Standup

  • [Tong] continuing the IdentityStrategy works.
  • [Andrew] - finishing up credential validation. Working on one last test for end-to-end validating inbox ids with signatures. Want to open for review today.
  • [Nick] Working on adding/removing users to groups
17

May 7, 2024

Agenda

  • Standup
  • discuss IdentityStrategy
  • Go through libxmtp integration list

Standup

  • [Andrew] Writing test for validating commit. Working on helping out Nick with lifetime stuff.
  • [Nick] Working through permissions and adding/removing members
  • [Tong] IdentityStrategy PR ready for review, adding small touchups. Next one bindings_ffi
18

May 9, 2024

Agenda

  • Standup

Standup

  • [Andrew] Lifetime changes are going well. Pretty big refactor, but should significantly improve our lives. Changed transaction logic to use Diesel’s transaction manager instead of passing in a mutable reference. Will rebase to main. Validation PR is working.
  • [Nick] Working on add/remove members. Have add missing installations flow business logic in, and the logic to create the commit from the intent.
  • [Tong] About halfway through Identity integration into the client builder
  • [Rich] Caching the association state for a given sequence_id.
19

May 14, 2024

Agenda

  • Standup
  • EIP 6492

Standup

  • [Rich] Been catching up. Working on caching the AssociationState for a given inbox id and sequence ID. Write up a doc with requirements for replication stuff. Will take on metrics
  • [Andrew] Hoping to finish the refactor today. Tests are passing. Might add the client back to MlsGroup to rock the boat less.
  • [Nick] Add/remove members is ready to go. Plan is to spend all day tomorrow integrating all the things and getting tests back to passing. Permissions are particularly tricky, since Cameron is actively working on them in parallel.
  • [Tong] Updating new_test_client and tests that depend on it.
20

May 16, 2024

Agenda

Standup

  • [Rich] Landed the association state caching PR. Wrote up a doc for replication requirements.
  • [Andrew] Credential validation for Go. Help with migration and E2E tests
  • [Tong] sequence_id PR is ready. FFI bindings are almost ready. Just working on the compiler issues. Will do some estimation on 6492.
  • [Nick] Got in permissions changes. Cameron is going to be building on top of identity release moving forward. Add/remove members is up for review