KOB Email Verification Service

Abstract

KOB Email Verification Services proves the ownership of user over his email. It provides verified digital credential for user’s email which is stored in user’s wallet. User submit this digital credential, when he provides his email for availing third party service, or the user authorize any third party to prove the identity of the user.

Dependent Project

TBD

Motivation

Current email security solutions depend on various attributes to reduce the chances that a given email (mail) is likely to be a threat.This is a decentralized, peer-to-peer, proof-of-work, encrypted mail system that uses blockchain technology to conduct email verification. Decentralized Identifier or DIDs refer to a system in which there is no common storage facility available. There might be many users who cannot setup and maintain DIDs themselves.

Status Of The Project

Incubation

Solution

To overcome this problem a blockchain based ledger service marks down an outgoing mail. Using this approach email details (e.g., sender, recipients, timestamp, etc.) are hashed and saved from any organization using email security gateways. Any organization receiving the mail can check it for authenticity via the blockchain service, thus the mail cannot be spam. This application can generate a lot of interest especially since spam mail has continued to circulate online, with some strategies linking the email to seemingly credible sources.

Steps to perform Email Verification:

1. User requests for a digital credential after submitting Email.

2. User recieves digital credential in his/her wallet.

3. User submit his/her email id for availing third party services.

4. The third party asks for digital credential to verify the ownership of email.

5. User presents the digital credential and avail third party services.

The verifier verifies the digital credential and allow the user to avail services.

Running a local instance

Pre-requisites

• Docker

• s2i

• jq

• ngrok

jq and ngrok are available on package manager systems for different platforms such as Homebrew (Mac), Chocolatey (Windows) and various Linux distribution package managers.

Install the service

Open the terminal and run the below command:

$ curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hyperledgerkochi/KOB-email-verification/dist/dist/get.kob_email_verification_service.io | bash

Running

Open two shell/terminal sessions:

1. From within the scripts folder execute ./start-ngrok.sh. This will create a tunnel for the agent.

2. From within the docker folder:

   • run ./manage build to assemble the runtime images for the services
   • when the build completes, run ./manage up

Refer to manage -h for additional usage information.

Once services are started, visit http://localhost:8080 to see the app running and visit http://localhost:8050 to see any outbound mail the app is sending (it won't actually send any email message in the development environment)

Stopping

To stop the service:

1. Open a new terminal

2. From within the docker folder:

   • run ./manage down

Contributors

Sweta Kumari

Refrences

• BCGOV's Indy Email Verification
• About VON