Welcome!

sideos provides SSI as a Service through a REST API that allows you to issue and verify SSI credentials.

Overview

This documentation will help you to get up to speed with the API of sideos SSI as a Service. The documentation provides you with an overview of the general flows, how to set up a client, and the description of the requests and the respective endpoint responses. If you never heard about SSI here's a short primer:

SSI is for Self-Sovereign Identity. It was developed to store identity data on some user device in a way it cannot be misused or tempered. The idea was to separate the roles in the identification flow in 3 roles: 1) the issuer of the identity data, 2) the holder of the identity, and 3) the verifier of the identity. That was a response of the growing problem internet users managing dozens of identities on the one side and service providers struggling to keep the user's data safe and compliant. The result was to use modern cryptography and a new data format to store data on a users device securely (as a verifiable credential) to define a protocol for offering and requesting these credentials.

That said, the general setup is therefore two-folded for 1) providing data and 2) requesting data:

1. Issuance of a verifiable credential: an issuer provides the user with the verifiable credential which the user checks and stores on the user's device.

2. Verifying a credential: a verifier (so called relying party because it relies on the issuer's competence and the protection of the credential) to request and verify a credential

issuing and verifying credentials

The API is build around these 2 general flows.

Setting the Scene

There are 3 basic components in an SSI flow:

1. The SSI wallet. Credentials will be stored in an SSI wallet. The wallet manages the cryptographic keys, interacts with issuers and verifiers and allows the user to decide which credentials are to be stored to shared.

2. The Issuer. Credentials are created by an issuer and provided to the Holder of the SSI wallet. Issuers converting data to verifiable credentials by building JSON data files following the SSI standards, in our case the W3C DID specification and signing the credentials with their private key.

3. The Verifier. Credentials provided by an SSI wallet can be used for example to login into a web service. The web service verifies the credential and checks the claims, the signatures, and who issued the credentials. If all is ok, the web services grants access eventually.

sideos helps Issuers and Verifiers to use the SSI protocol with very little effort. The API is called to wrap data into SSI protocol and allow for example a Web Service to interact with SSI wallets.

Starting with an Example

We've prepared an example for a small web service that integrates with the sideos API to provide a passwordless login bases on SSI credentials. You can start from there to see the API in action and get your hands dirty:

Quick Start

Want to jump right in?

To access the API you need to retrieve an API Key. To get one, sign up for an account with sideos there is a free trial account to get started:

Sign up & get started

Want to deep dive?

Dive a little deeper and start exploring our API reference to get an idea of everything that's possible with the API:

API Reference