frauth - The Friend Authenticator

Frauth is a command line tool to verify the identity of friends in a decentralized manner.

It is currently in an early alpha state.

Design Principles

Frauth aims to provide reasonable default behavior for actions including:

• Identity validation
• Discovery of mutual friends
• Signing and verification of messages or files
• Encryption and decryption of messages or files

Frauth does not aim to be configurable with regards to cryptography, instead selecting one reasonable way to do things.

Installing

For early releases, you must build frauth from source. frauth is written in Rust. You can install from source in one of two ways:

• Run cargo install frauth, OR
• Clone this repo (e.g. git clone https://github.com/jamesmunns/frauth.git), and run cargo install --path . in the cli directory

In the future, binaries will be provided. frauth should work on any major OS.

TL;DR HOWTO

This section will be rewritten later once I have more time. For now:

• You install frauth.
• You initialize your info using frauth init
• You create a text file using frauth publish that contains:
  • Your name
  • Your ed25519 public key, generated by frauth
  • Some metadata of your choice
• This text file is signed with your ed25519 private key
• You put this text file on a static website you control. You could host this at:
  • GitHub Pages
  • Netlify
  • AWS/S3
  • Really anywhere you can host a text file
• Where you host the text file becomes your unique identity.
  • Usually you call this file me.frauth.
  • My identity lives at https://jamesmunns.com/me.frauth.

In the future, you will be able to do stuff like discover friends, sign/verify/encrypt/decrypt messages and files, or more.

TL;DR Commands

Note: You can use --help at any level to get more information

• frauth
  • frauth init - Set up frauth on first use
  • frauth friend - Actions around verified friends
    • frauth friend add <url> - Add a friend by their published URL
    • frauth friend list [--detailed] - List all of your friends (and their info)
    • frauth friend remove <url> - Remove a friend by their published URL
    • frauth friend update <url> - Update information from a friend
  • frauth publish [--output PATH] - Create a plain text file you can host on a static site

Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

License

This project is licensed under GPLv3.0. See the license for more details