identity-provider contains a Web3 Subprovider for interacting with Ethereum
accounts without keys present, like accounts signed by external device, or
contract identities that are independent from any key. It uses web3-provider-engine
to intercept account-related RPC calls. To sign transactions, you pass a Web3 Provider
for the IdentitySubprovider to use, like Metamask's injected provider. A
KeystoreSubprovider that uses eth-lightwallet to sign keys is provided. Most
apps will want to start new users with an in-browser keystore that they can
easily migrate their contract identity away from.
Once a transaction key has been funded, identity-provider can create a
contract-based identity by deploying uport-proxy's' proxy contract and
maintaining relevant metadata to allow transactions to be sent as that identity.
See test/transfer-ether.js, which creates a contract identity and sends ether
back and forth.
Run the Mocha test suite with npm test, which will use an in-memory TestRPC.
The test suite can be run against an arbitrary Ethereum daemon to test against
production codebases with npm test -- --live-daemon http://localhost:8545,
where any HTTP URL can be provided as the --live-daemon argument.
- Add a URLHandlerIdentity that generates and opens a URL that uses lightwallet-mobile's URL scheme instead of trying to sign the transaction locally. The IdentityProvider just needs to know the addresses that the system's URL handlers can sign for to add it to its list of identities.
- Build a reliable process for recovering contract-based identities when only the seed is provided. Search through the key's transaction history for contract creation, then test ABI calls for known authentication mechanisms to see if they work. This won't work for recovered seeds that had contract identities transferred to them after creation, but it's better than nothing.