Business Partner Agent

Short Description

The BPA allows organizations to verify, hold, and issue verifiable credentials.

The Business Partner Agent is built on top of the Hyperledger Self-Sovereign Identity Stack, in particular Hyperledger Indy and Hyperledger Cloud Agent Python.

Most Important Features

Attach a public organizational profile to your public DID (either did:indy/sov or did:web)
Add business partners by their public DIDs or via invitations and view their public profiles
Business partners can be other cloud agents or smartphone wallets
Basic chat functionality to interact with business partners
Add documents based on Indy schemas and request verifications from business partners
Issue verifiable credentials to your business partners
Create templates for presentation requests supporting zero knowledge proofs (selective disclose and predicate proofs)
Send and respond to presentation requests

Features in Detail

Role/Feature	Flow	Protocol Version
Issuer
	auto: issue credential	indy: v1, v2 w3c: v2
	manual: send credential offer to holder	indy: v1, v2 w3c: v2
	manual: receive credential proposal from holder	indy: v1, v2 w3c: v2
	manual: decline credential proposal from holder and provide reason	indy: v1, v2 w3c: v2
	send credential offer as invitation attachment	indy: v2
	revoke issued credential (requires tails server)	indy: v1, v2 w3c: n/a
	send revocation notification	indy: v1, v2 w3c: n/a
Holder
	auto: receive credential	indy: v1, v2 w3c: v2
	manual: send credential proposal to issuer (based on document)	indy: v1, v2 w3c: v2
	manual: receive credential offer from issuer	indy: v1, v2 w3c: v2
	manual: decline credential offer from issuer	indy: v1, v2 w3c: v2
	scheduled revocation check on all received credentials	indy: v1, v2 w3c: n/a
	receive revocation notification	indy: v1, v2 w3c: n/a
Prover
	auto: send presentation to verifier	indy: v1, v2
	auto: answer presentation request	indy: v1, v2
	manual: accept/decline presentation request and provide reason	indy: v1, v2
Verifier
	auto: request presentation from prover based on proof template	indy: v1, v2
	auto: receive and verify presentation from prover	indy: v1, v2
Connection
	connect by did:sov, did:web (if endpoint is aca-py)	did-exchange
	receive invitation by URL	connection-protocol, OOB
	create invitation (barcode or URL)	connection-protocol, OOB
	auto: accept incoming connection	did-exchange, connection-protocol
	manual: accept incoming connection	did-exchange, connection-protocol
	optional: scheduled trust ping to check connection status	n/a
	tag a connection, e.g. as trusted issuer	n/a
Ledger
	send schema to the ledger (requires endorser role)	n/a
	create a credential definition on the ledger (requires endorser role)	n/a
Basic Message
	send and receive basic messages via chat window	n/a
Tasks/Activities
	list of tasks that need attention, and list of past activities	n/a
TAA
	if ledger is configured with a TAA, show it and give option to accept	n/a
Read Only Ledger
	if mode is set to web only	n/a
Public Profile
	web accessible (self signed) imprint based on credentials or documents	n/a

Upcoming Features

Support additional verifiable credential formats (W3C JSON-LD VCs in addition to Indy Anoncreds)
Business rules to automate processes
Endorser support (both as endorser and transaction author)
Multi-user and roles support

Project Status

A first alpha version of Business Partner Agent is available, see Helm Chart and Docker images It is not ready for production use. Releases are in general considered "alpha", which means API may change at any time and we do not have explicit / planned system tests (See also Publishing).

Getting Started

The Business Partner Agent supports two modes

Web mode: Serves a did:web identity and allows to publish a public organizational profile.
Indy mode: Utilizes an identity on an Hyperledger Indy ledger (default: https://indy-test.bosch-digital.de/)

Both modes are currently coupled with a specific instance of an Indy network in order to read schemas and credential definitions. The agent is started in Indy mode per default and tries to connect with our test network. Please refer to the .env-example file to start the agent in web mode or connect to a different Indy network.

Run a business partner agent with docker-compose or helm

You can run the agent via docker-compose (recommended for e.g. development / debugging) or deploy it into a kubernetes cluster (via helm).

Run a business partner agent with gitpod

The easiest way to run two agents, is to work with gitpod. Gitpod launches a pre-configured IDE in the browser and the agents being launched in the background. See debugging docu.

Documentation and Tutorials

User documentation is located at https://hyperledger-labs.github.io/business-partner-agent

Learn how to contribute in Contributing. You can also start by filing an issue.

Regarding release process, we do not follow a strict process yet, nevertheless we follow the guidelines described in Publishing.

Learn what aries protocols can be controlled by the BPA in aca-py-args