Internet Identity Service

See ./docs/internet-identity-spec.adoc for a details specification and technical documentation.

Official build

The official build should ideally be reproducible, so that independent parties can validate that we really deploy what we claim to deploy.

We try to achieve some level of reproducibility using a Dockerized build environment. The following steps should build the official Wasm image

docker build -t internet-identity-service .
docker run --rm --entrypoint cat internet-identity-service /internet_identity.wasm > internet_identity.wasm
sha256sum internet_identity.wasm

The resulting internet_identity.wasm is ready for deployment as rdmx6-jaaaa-aaaaa-aaadq-cai, which is the reserved principal for this service.

Our CI also performs these steps; you can compare the SHA256 with the output there, or download the artifact there.

Software versions

• dfx version 0.7.0

• Rust version 1.51

• NodeJS (with npm) version TBD

• CMake

Running Locally

To run the internet_identity canisters, proceed as follows after cloning the repository

npm install
dfx start [--clean] [--background]

In a different terminal, run the following command to install the Internet Identity canister:

II_ENV=development dfx deploy --no-wallet --argument '(null)'

Then the canister can be used as

$ dfx canister call internet_identity init_salt
()
$ echo $?
0

See dfx canister call --help and the documentation for more information.

The dfx executable can proxy queries to the canister. To view it, run the following and open the resulting link in your browser:

echo "http://localhost:8000?canisterId=$(dfx canister id internet_identity)"

Contributing to the frontend

The fastest workflow to get the development environment running is to deploy once with

npm ci
dfx start [--clean] [--background]
II_ENV=development dfx deploy --no-wallet --argument '(null)'

To serve the frontend locally via webpack (recommended during development), run the following:

npm start

Then open http://localhost:8080 in your browser. Webpack will reload the page whenever you save changes to files. To ensure your changes pass our formatting and linter checks, run the following command:

npm run format && npm run lint

To customize your canister ID for deployment or particular local development, create a .env file in the root of the project and add a CANISTER_ID attribute. It should look something like

CANISTER_ID=rrkah-fqaaa-aaaaa-aaaaq-cai

Finally, to test workflows like authentication from a client application, you start the sample app:

cd demos/sample-javascript
npm run develop

Then open http://localhost:8081 in your browser.

Make sure that the "Identity Provider" is set to "http://localhost:8080" if you serve the Internet Identity frontend from webpack.

NOTE on testing on LAN:

If you are testing on LAN -- for instance, connecting to an Internet Identity server running on your laptop from your smartphone over WiFi -- you may run into the following issues:

• The webpage may not be accessible on LAN. By default webpack will serve the content using the localhost host. Firewall rules for localhost are somewhat strict; if you cannot access the page from devices on your LAN try serving with webpack serve --host 0.0.0.0.
• Internet Identity may tell you that your browser is not supported. The reason for this is that some security-focused features are only enabled on https and localhost pages. A workaround is to use ngrok to forward your local port over https.

Test suites

We have a set of Selenium tests that run through the various flows. To run them locally follow the steps in .github/workflows/selenium.yml.

We autoformat our code using prettier. Running npm run format formats all files in the frontend. If you open a PR that isn't formatted according to prettier, CI will automatically add a formatting commit to your PR.

We use eslint to check the frontend code. You can run it with npm run lint, or set up your editor to do it for you.

Contributing to the backend

The Internet Identity backend is a Wasm canister implemented in Rust and built from the internet_identity cargo package (src/internet_identity). Some canister functionality lives in separate libraries that can also be built to native code to simplify testing, e.g., src/certified_map, src/hashtree, src/cubehash, etc.

Run the following command in the root of the repository to execute the test suites of all the libraries:

cargo test

The backend canister is also used to serve the frontend assets. This creates a dependency between the frontend and the backend. So running the usual cargo build --target wasm32-unknown-unknown -p internet_identity might not work or include an outdated version of the frontend.

Use the following command to build the backend canister Wasm file instead:

dfx build internet_identity

The Wasm file will be located at target/wasm32-unknown-unknown/release/internet_identity.wasm.