irmago

irmago is an IRMA implementation in Go. It contains multiple libraries and applications:

The commandline tool irma, which contains an IRMA server; subcommands for manipulating IRMA schemes, generating IRMA issuer public/private keypairs, performing test IRMA sessions on the command line; and more.
The Go library irmaserver providing a HTTP server that handles IRMA session with the IRMA mobile app, and functions for starting and managing IRMA sessions.
The root package irma contains generic IRMA functionality used by all other components below, such as parsing IRMA schemes, parsing IRMA metadata attributes, and structs representing messages of the IRMA protocol.
The Go package irmaclient is a library that serves as the client in the IRMA protocol; it can receive and disclose IRMA attributes and store and read them from storage. It also implements the keyshare protocol and handles registering to keyshare servers. The IRMA mobile app uses irmaclient.

Documentation

Technical documentation of all components of irmago and more can be found at https://irma.app/docs.

Running (development)

The easiest way to run the irma command line tool for development purposes is using Docker.

docker-compose run irma

For example, to start a simple IRMA session:

IP=192.168.1.2 # Replace with your local IP address.
docker-compose run -p 48680:48680 irma session --disclose pbdf.sidn-pbdf.email.email --url "http://$IP:48680"

You can run the irma keyshare services locally using the test configuration in testdata/configurations.

# To run the IRMA keyshare server
docker-compose run -p 8080:8080 irma keyshare server -c ./testdata/configurations/keyshareserver.yml
# To run the MyIRMA backend server
docker-compose run -p 8081:8081 irma keyshare myirmaserver -c ./testdata/configurations/myirmaserver.yml

Installing

Using Go

To install the latest released version of the irma command line tool using Go, you do the following.

go install github.com/privacybydesign/irmago/irma@latest

You can also specify an exact version. You should replace v0.0.0 with the desired version number.

go install github.com/privacybydesign/irmago/irma@v0.0.0

Using a container

If you want a container image of the irma command line tool, then you can use our ghcr.io/privacybydesign/irma image.

docker run ghcr.io/privacybydesign/irma:latest

The images are tagged in the following way:

latest: latest released version of irma
edge: HEAD of the main development branch (master)
v0.0.0: irma version (replace v0.0.0 with the desired version number)

When you build for production, we recommend you to use the latest release.

In case you want to use v0.12.6 or lower, then you should build it yourself.

VERSION=v0.8.0
git checkout $VERSION
git checkout master -- Dockerfile
docker build -t privacybydesign/irma:$VERSION .

Using pre-compiled binaries

You can find pre-compiled binaries of the irma command line tool on the GitHub release page. We recommend you to use the latest release.

Running the unit tests

Some of the unit tests connect to locally running external services, namely PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server and an SMTP server running at port 1025. These need to be up and running before these tests can be executed. This can be done using docker-compose.

Running the tests

In case you chose to start PostgreSQL and MailHog using docker-compose, you first need to start these services:

docker-compose up

When the databases and MailHog are running, the tests can be run using:

go test -p 1 ./...

The option ./... makes sure all tests are run. You can also limit the number of tests by only running the tests from a single directory or even from a single file, for example only running all tests in the directory ./internal/sessiontest. When you only want to execute one single test, for example the TestDisclosureSession test, you can do this by adding the option -run TestDisclosureSession.
The option -p 1 is necessary to prevent parallel execution of tests. Most tests use file manipulation and therefore tests can interfere.

Running without Docker

If installing Docker or Docker alternatives is not an option for you, then you can exclude all tests that use those by additionally passing --tags=local_tests:

go test -p 1 --tags=local_tests ./...

Running without Go

You can also run the tests fully in Docker using the command below. This is useful when you don't want to install the Go compiler locally. By default, all tests are run one-by-one without parallel execution.

docker-compose run test

You can override the default command by specifying command line options for go test manually, for example:

docker-compose run test ./internal/sessiontest -run TestDisclosureSession

We always enforce the -p 1 option to be used (as explained above).

Using a local Redis datastore

irmago can either store session states in memory (default) or in a Redis datastore. For local testing purposes you can use the standard Redis docker container:

docker pull redis
docker run --name redis-test-instance -p 6379:6379 -d redis

You can then start irma with the store-type flag set to Redis and the default configuration file.

irma server -vv --store-type redis --redis-addr "localhost:6379" --redis-allow-empty-password --redis-no-tls

If you use Redis in Sentinel mode for high availability, you need to consider whether you accept the risk of losing session state in case of a failover. Redis does not guarantee strong consistency in these setups. We mitigated this by waiting for a write to have reached the master node and at least one replica. This means that at least two replicas should be configured for every master node to achieve high availability. Even then, there is a small chance of losing session state when a replica fails at the same time as the master node. For example, this might be problematic if you want to guarantee that a credential is not issued twice or if you need a session QR to have a long lifetime but you do want the session to be finished soon after the QR is scanned. If you require IRMA sessions to be highly consistent, you should use the default in-memory store or Redis in standalone mode. If you accept this risk, then you can enable Sentinel mode support by setting the --redis-accept-inconsistency-risk flag.

Besides the irma server, Redis can also be configured for the irma keyshare server and the irma keyshare myirmaserver in the same way as described above. Note that the irma keyshare server does not become stateless when using Redis, because it stores the keyshare commitments and authentication challenges in memory. These cannot be stored in Redis, because we require this data to be strongly consistent. Instead, you can use sticky sessions to make sure that the same user is always routed to the same keyshare server instance. The stored commitments and challenges are only relevant for a few seconds, so the risk of losing this data is low. The irma keyshare myirmaserver does become stateless when using Redis.

Performance tests

This project only includes performance tests for the irma keyshare server. These tests can be run using the k6 load testing tool and need a running keyshare server instance to test against. Instructions on how to run a keyshare server locally can be found above.

The performance tests can be started in the following way:

go install go.k6.io/k6@latest
k6 run ./testdata/performance/keyshare-server.js --env URL=http://localhost:8080 --env ISSUER_ID=test.test

By default, k6 runs a single test iteration using 1 virtual user. These defaults can be adjusted by specifying test stages using the -s CLI parameter.

Contact

Request access to our IRMA slack channel by mailing to our support if you want to become part of the community. In our slack channels, the latest news on IRMA are shared and technical details get discussed.

For responsible disclosure mail to our responsible disclosure mailbox