cert-issuer

The cert-issuer project issues blockchain certificates by creating a transaction from the issuing institution to the recipient on the Bitcoin or Ethereum blockchains. That transaction includes the hash of the certificate itself.

Blockcerts v3 is released. This new version of the standard leverages the W3C Verifiable Credentials specification, and documents are signed with MerkleProof2019 LD signature. Use of DIDs (Decentralized Identifiers) is also possible to provide more cryptographic proof of the ownership of the issuing address. See section down below

Cert-issuer v3 is not backwards compatible and does not support Blockcerts v2 issuances. If you need to work with v2, you need to install cert-issuer v2 or use the v2 branch of this repo. You may expect little to no maintenance to the v2 code at this point.

Web resources

For development or testing using web requests, check out the documentation at docs/web_resources.md.

Quick start using Docker

Getting the Docker image

This uses bitcoind in regtest mode. This route makes many simplifications to allow a quick start, and is intended for experimenting only.

1. First ensure you have Docker installed. See our Docker installation help.

2. Clone the repo and change to the directory

   git clone https://github.com/blockchain-certificates/cert-issuer.git && cd cert-issuer
   

3. From a command line in cert-issuer dir, build your docker container:

   docker build -t bc/cert-issuer:1.0 .
   

4. Read before running!

   • Once you launch the docker container, you will make some changes using your personal issuing information. This flow mirrors what you would if you were issuing real certificates.

   • To avoid losing your work, you should create snapshots of your docker container. You can do this by running:

     docker ps -l
     docker commit  my_cert_issuer
     

5. When you're ready to run:

   docker run -it bc/cert-issuer:1.0 bash
   

6. Copy the blockchain certificates you issued out of the docker container to a local directory

   docker cp :/etc/cert-issuer/data/blockchain_certificates/.json 
   

Create issuing address

Important: this is a simplification to avoid using a USB, which needs to be inserted and removed during the standard certficate issuing process. Do not use these addresses or private keys for anything other than experimenting.

Ensure your docker image is running and bitcoind process is started

1. Creating a wallet first with bitcoin-cli createwallet “”

   bitcoin-cli createwallet "testwallet"
   

2. Load wallet `bitcoin-cli loadwallet "