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Welcome to Verida Storage Node Server

This server acts as middleware between web applications built using the Verida Datastore and the underlying databases storing user data.

Key features:

  • Ensuring all API requests come from verified Verida network users (via user signed messages)
  • Managing database users, linking them to valid DID's
  • Managing permissions for individual databases
  • Adding a second layer of security by managing per-database ACL validation rules
  • Providing applications with user's database connection strings

How Authorization Works

This is the login flow:

  1. The Verida Account makes a request to the storage node API to obtain an auth JWT to be signed (/auth/generateAuthJwt). This prevents replay attacks.
  2. The Verida Account signs a consent message using their private key. This consent message proves the user wants to unlock a specific application context
  3. The Verida Account submits the signed authorization request (/auth/authenticate). Assuming the signed AuthJWT is valid, the storage node returns a refresh token and an access token
  4. The Verida Account can then use the access token to either; 1) make storage node requests (ie: create database) or 2) directly access CouchDB as an authenticated user (using Bearer token auth)
  5. When the access token expires, the Verida Account can use the refresh token to request a new access token (/auth/connect)
  6. If a refresh token is close to expiry, the Verida Account can use the active refresh token to obtain a new refresh token (/auth/regenerateRefreshToken)

When a Verida Account authenticates, it can designate an authenticate requst to be linked to a particular device by specifying the deviceId in the request.

This allows a specific device to be linked to a refresh token. A call to /auth/invalidateDeviceId can be used to invalidate any refresh tokens linked to the specified deviceId. This allows the Verida Vault to remotely log out an application that previously logged in.

Note: This only invalidates the refresh token. The access token will remain valid until it expires. It's for this reason that access tokens are configured to have a short expiry (5 minutes by default). CouchDB does not support manually invalidating access tokens, so we have to take this timeout approach to invalidation.

Usage

yarn install
yarn build
yarn serve

Configuration

A sample.env is included. Copy this to .env and update the configuration:

  • VERIDA_NETWORK: Verida network to use. See https://developers.verida.network/docs/infrastructure/networks for valid networks. (ie: banksia)
  • DB_PROTOCOL: Protocol to use when connecting to CouchDB (http or https).
  • DB_USER: Username of CouchDB Admin (has access to create users and databases).
  • DB_PASS: Password of CouchDB Admin.
  • DB_HOST: Hostname of CouchDB Admin.
  • DB_PORT: Port of CouchDB server (5984).
  • DB_REPLICATION_USER: Replication username (for replicating data to other nodes). MUST be set to something random. MUST not change once the node is operational.
  • DB_REPLICATION_PASS: Replication password (for replicating data to other nodes). MUST be set to something random. MUST not change once the node is operational.
  • DB_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED_SSL: Boolean indicating if unauthorized SSL certificates should be rejected (true or false). Defaults to false for development testing. Must be true for production environments otherwise SSL certificates won't be verified.
  • DB_PUBLIC_USER: Alphanumeric string for a public database user. These credentials can be requested by anyone and provide access to all databases where the permissions have been set to public.
  • DB_PUBLIC_PASS: Alphanumeric string for a public database password.
  • DB_REFRESH_TOKENS: Internal CouchDB database that stores refresh tokens (ie: verida_refresh_tokens)
  • ACCESS_JWT_SIGN_PK: The access token private key. The base64 version of this must be specified in the CouchDB configuration under jwt_keys/hmac:_default
  • REFRESH_JWT_SIGN_PK: The refresh token private key
  • DB_PROTOCOL_INTERNAL: Internal database protocol (http or https).
  • DB_HOST_INTERNAL: Internal database hostname (ie: localhost)
  • DB_PORT_INTERNAL: Internal database port (ie: 5984)
  • DB_PROTOCOL_INTERNAL: External database protocol (http or https).
  • DB_HOST_INTERNAL: External database hostname (ie: mydomain.com)
  • DB_PORT_INTERNAL: External database port (ie: 5984)
  • ENDPOINT_URI: The public URI of this storage node server (Will match what is stored in DID Documents). Note: Must include the port and have NO trailing slash. (ie: "http://localhost:5000")
  • VDA_PRIVATE_KEY: Verida network private key as a hex string. Including leading 0x. This is used to sign server responses and in the future, prove VDA tokens are staked for this node. (ie: 0xaaaabbbb...)
  • MAX_USERS: Maximum number of users supported by this node (ie: 10000)
  • PORT: Port this server runs on (ie: 5151)

Setting up environment variables on Windows

  • On a powershell execute the following ( replica of .env )
$env:DID_CACHE_DURATION=3600
$env:DB_PROTOCOL="http"
$env:DB_USER="admin"
$env:DB_PASS="admin"
$env:DB_HOST="localhost"
$env:DB_PORT=5984
$env:DB_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED_SSL=false
$env:DB_PUBLIC_USER="784c2n780c9cn0789"
$env:DB_PUBLIC_PASS="784c2n780c9cn0789"

CouchDB configuration

  • CORS must be enabled so that database requests can come from any domain name
  • A valid user must be enforced for security reasons

Ensure {chttpd_auth, jwt_authentication_handler} is added to the list of the active chttpd/authentication_handlers

[couchdb]
single_node=true

[chttpd]
authentication_handlers = {chttpd_auth, jwt_authentication_handler}, {chttpd_auth, cookie_authentication_handler}, {chttpd_auth, default_authentication_handler}
enable_cors = true

[chttpd_auth]
require_valid_user = true

[jwt_auth]
required_claims = exp

[jwt_keys]
hmac:_default = <base64 secret key>

[cors]
origins = *
credentials = true
methods = GET, PUT, POST, HEAD, DELETE
headers = accept, authorization, content-type, origin, referer, x-csrf-token

The hmac:_default key is a base64 encoded representation of the access token JWT private key

Generating JWT key

Note: A secret key (string) suitable for jwt_keys can be base64 encoded with the following:

const secretKey = 'secretKey'
const encodedKey = Buffer.from(secretKey).toString('base64')

This can be tested via curl:

curl -H "Host: localhost:5984" \
 -H "accept: application/json, text/plain, */*" \
 -H "authorization: Bearer <bearer_token>" \
  "http://localhost:5984/_session"

Where:

  • bearer_token - A bearer token generated via the test/jwt unit test
  • localhost - Replace this with the hostname of the server being tested

Docker

You can spin up storage node API on your machine with Docker:

docker run --init --env-file=.env verida/storage-node:latest

Deploying a new Docker Image to Docker Hub

Note that this uses the experimental buildx command to build both AMD64 (Intel/AMD servers) and ARM64 (Mac) images.

  • Login (details in BitWarden)
docker buildx build --platform linux/amd64,linux/arm64 --push -t verida/storage-node:latest .

Tests

Run tests with yarn run tests

You will need to update /test/config.js with at least the VDA_PRIVATE_KEY, DID_CLIENT_CONFIG.web3Config.privateKey and possibily ENDPOINTS and SERVER_URL.

Common issues when running tests:

  1. Bad key: The key in CouchDB configuration for jwt_keys/hmac:_default is not a valid Base64 encoded key
  2. HMAC error: The key in CouchDB configuration for jwt_keys/hmac:_default does not match ACCESS_JWT_SIGN_PK in .env

Testing a deployed node

To test a deployed node, do the following

  • Modify test/config.js with the correct endpoint URLs
  • Run yarn test test/server.js

Production Infrastructure Notes

When deploying behind a HTTP load balancer it is important to make sure it doesn't close the connection during a long-poll call. The server will keep pushing data through this connection, but some load balancers (eg the Google Cloud loadbalancer) will close anyway. In these case configure the load balancer with a long timeout (we recommend 3600 seconds).

Infrastructure requirements

The Verida team is currently operating nodes with the following hardware requirements:

  1. 16GB RAM
  2. 4vCPUs
  3. 1TB storage (20,000 storage slots)

These cost approx $US250 / month on AWS / GCP / Azure.

Ideally nodes will have burstable CPU usage as the number of connected users is CPU bound and can fluxuate depending on active demand from end users.