Hedgehog Ethereum wallet: Build DApps like apps, without centralized keys

https://hedgehog.audius.co/

by roneil • 7 years ago

144 56 7 years ago

hedgehog.audius.co

This is so badly needed in the Ethereum space. Metamask is a massive drag and a known onboarding blocker -- Hedgehog seems like a huge leap forward. Congrats team!

michaelsbradley7• 7 years ago

Check out Dapper and Fortmatic as well.

aakilfernandes• 7 years ago

This could occupy a useful space, but it is by no means a Metamask replacement (which they explain why).

invalidmonk2• 7 years ago

Excited to see what people build with this

emilyhou• 7 years ago

This is awesome! Looks so much more streamlined and easier to use. Excited to see it used widely.

roneil17• 7 years ago

Hey all - I'm Roneil, one of the cofounders of Audius. We built Hedgehog to solve a specific pain point we faced - how can we get non crypto-native / non-technical users to sign up for a decentralized app? Current onboarding flows using Metamask and other alternatives were too cumbersome, time-consuming, and restrictive for our needs. We needed a way to generate a wallet on behalf of a user without them even knowing crypto was operating behind the scenes.

Hedgehog lives in your front end Javascript code. A user enters a username (or email) and password, which is used to secure a set of encrypted auth artifacts that are generated client-side and stored in the browser’s localStorage / on your (the application developer's) server. In this way, the encrypted auth artifacts can be retrieved and consumed on secondary devices without centralizing custody and control of the private key.

If the centralized server hosting the keys goes down, users can continue to access their wallet on the devices they already have. If the centralized server is compromised or operated by bad actors, the resources required to decrypt a stored auth artifact would be immense. However - this is why we recommend using Hedgehog only in low-to-no financial value use cases.

This approach is not without tradeoffs - but for the right use-cases we believe this will provide a needed alternative.

Happy to answer any questions you all have!

atomical3• 7 years ago

Is there any way to recover a login and password if the user forgets it?

michaelsbradley7• 7 years ago

No.

See: https://audiusproject.github.io/hedgehog-docs/#important-los...

roneil17• 7 years ago

Thanks for checking out Hedgehog!

There is not - this is the biggest deficiency of Hedgehog today. Without centralized custody of keys, it's not possible to have someone prove their ownership of a given key to a centralized party in order to unlock it. The key is encrypted, so the application provider nor anyone else can decrypt it without the user's username/password combination. This tradeoff is both a good thing and a bad thing in our view.

That said, there is a mechanism for changing your password if you are already signed in.

We are considering some mechanisms for fallbacks, eg using a threshold cryptosystem with multiple private keys and a 1 or 2 of n requirement, such that if a user forgets the way to generate one of the n keys they may still remember a way to generate the other(s). If you're curious, more on these schemes here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_cryptosystem

We feel these tradeoffs make sense to enable more mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies, but they are tradeoffs; for certain types of applications the cost of losing control of an account is too high for this approach to make sense.

michaelsbradley7• 7 years ago

Has there been any thought as to how the REST API + database side of this could be replaced with ipfs/swarm? I'm not sure how it would work, and there would likely be additional trade-offs, but it would be nice if the "D" in DApps could be retained in full.

roneil17• 7 years ago

There has! This could be a great approach - eg. a network of folks committed to supporting users in this manner could operate IPFS nodes that re-pin the encrypted keys.

We are also thinking about offline ways to share the key such that the centralized side is not required - eg. a QR code displayed on one device and scanned by another to propagate the wallet. This creates a problem if a user loses all of their devices though.

rladd• 7 years ago

Hi Roneil

It looks very cool. Just skimming the documentation, there isn't anything on how to perform actual wallet functions, or whether encrypt/decrypt data using public/private keys is available (which is something I'd find super useful!). Am I missing it, or is it just a matter of looking through the code?

Thanks for making something as cool as this open source!

roneil17• 7 years ago

Thanks for checking out Hedgehog!

This was documented only indirectly - we should add a specific note / example for this. The model here is that the ethereumjs-wallet object returned by Hedgehog (eg. by getWallet https://audiusproject.github.io/hedgehog-docs/#getwallet ) follows this API https://github.com/ethereumjs/ethereumjs-wallet which, when used in tandem with this package https://github.com/ethereumjs/ethereumjs-tx can do everything a normal Ethereum wallet would.

aey• 7 years ago

That is fantastic! Any way to integrate other chains?

roneil17• 7 years ago

Right now Hedgehog is specific to the Ethereum account model (eg. POA network and others use this too), but there's no reason the approach couldn't be extended to work with other chains.

Here's the key section of code that makes this Ethereum-specific: https://github.com/AudiusProject/hedgehog/blob/master/src/au...

You could replace the use of 'ethereumjs-wallet/hdkey' with any other chain wallet library if it is compatible with the BIP-39 style HDWallet structure. Bitcoin and many other blockchains have compatible libraries that could be substituted easily!

corbinpage• 7 years ago

Awesome work, and it's great to see more tools in this important area.

How do you handle the "Forgot Password" problem?

Say, if a user clears out local storage and forgets their password. Is there a way to recover it from what's stored on the server?

roneil17• 7 years ago

Great question - see my response to "atomical" in this thread for more detail, but short answer is no. Thanks for checking out Hedgehog!

thinkmassive• 7 years ago

Very cool, glad to see people tackling Ethereum UX! Your project seems similar to the Burner Wallet by Austin Griffith: https://github.com/austintgriffith/burner-wallet

Assuming you've seen that project, how does Hedgehog compare?

Do you have recommendations on handling the initial funding of a wallet, especially for your target market of non-technical users? (after they have the wallet, how do they obtain ETH or other tokens to get started?)

roneil17• 7 years ago

We haven't seen that before, looks cool! The approach may be similar, but we packaged Hedgehog as a standalone / documented library to be consumed directly by developers. In looking briefly I wasn't able to ascertain how the private key is stored / propagated between devices in his model so it's hard to comment more precisely.

The approach we've taken at Audius on initial funding is to avoid funding the wallet entirely - we use EIP-712 signatures combined with a trustless transaction relay service that pays gas / submits EIP-712 signed transactions on-chain on behalf of users. In this way, the user wallet never holds any tokens but is still used to secure access to their account. We'll be open-sourcing our contracts and infrastructure code soon, but here's a good public example of this model in action: https://github.com/hellobloom/core/tree/master/contracts

That said, other folks may decide to use Hedgehog differently - perhaps you integrate with something like Wyre (https://www.sendwyre.com/) to help users fund their wallet client-side without knowing that crypto is there.

vinliao3• 7 years ago

Hey Roneil, I'm really new to crypto development and I'm having a hard time finding crypto communities for developers (the one who builds stuff). I've checked out eth's forum but it's not really developer focused, it's too general.

Where do you usually hang out? I would like to learn more about building crypto stuff and would like to participate in a community. Can you point me in the right direction?

Thank you!

PS: I have completely no idea what Audius is about, but it sounds cool. Good luck!

solotronics• 7 years ago

For lightning protocol devs there is a public slack they hang out in. You might want to look around for one for Eth.

roneil17• 7 years ago

Hi there! Unfortunately I haven't found any high-quality online communities of crypto builders - most of my connections to other folks building are offline / irl. Would encourage you to attend local developer groups to get to know others in the space!

There are tons of helpful resources online though, as lots of folks write tutorials and other things. Googling most problems you face will yield good results.

tuesdayrain• 7 years ago

r/ethdev is a good one. Much more developer focused than r/ethereum.

alexgpark• 7 years ago

Looks compelling, been waiting for something like this to come along. Built a couple dapps with Metamask and the popups and mnemonic phrases and browser extension installation were a serious UX issue that had no real workaround and seemingly no timeline for improvement. AFAIK, development seems to have slowed or stopped entirely on Metamask? Will try working with this and share any feedback. Nice work guys, thanks for moving the space forward

ejanus2• 7 years ago

What are you working on ?

danfinlay• 7 years ago

MetaMask is actually working hard on these problems, and building faster than ever, but they're big problems that aren't trivially fixed in a point release. You can expect some big announcements this summer.

throwayEngineer• 7 years ago

Any Ethereum developers have a plan once ETH gets log jammed again?

Apps will be slow to respond and take minutes or hours between updates.

Is this accepted as you wait for a new solution to the byzantine generals problem?

atomical3• 7 years ago

Sidechains like Loom network are making progress, but Ethereum 2.0 is a ways off.

ejanus2• 7 years ago

Could you explain you statement with facts ?

roneil17• 7 years ago

The existing issues with ETH are why we currently use POA network for the Audius private beta. POA network has its own set of issues, but the 1) fast transaction confirmation time, 2) low fees, and 3) lack of congestion make it a great testbed for us.

FWIW, Hedgehog works with any web3-compliant API, in our case core.poa.network but could be any other one of developer's choosing eg. Infura

asenna• 7 years ago

This looks brilliant, addresses a very real pain point and your landing page communicates it well with the demo. Kudos!

Will give this a try on our Dapp.

ErikAugust• 7 years ago

Certainly a much needed application in the Ethereum space.

As a blockchain game developer, I have talked ad nauseum (https://steemit.com/marketing/@steem.marketing/cache-the-gam...) about reasons why we switched away from Ethereum for most transactions (but not all).

The UX of the wallet being one difficulty for adoption. There are other even bigger reasons (in my opinion) - variable mining fees per transaction being a large one.

trentonv• 7 years ago

lol I made an account just to add this reply. Are you familiar with EIP 1559? There are solid efforts currently ramping up research to change the fee market from an auction to a flat fee:

https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/eip-1559-fee-market-change-...

zeroxfe• 7 years ago

I guess you can't change your password (while keeping the same private key), can you?

roneil17• 7 years ago

You can! This would re-encrypt your locally decrypted wallet seed using the new credential and store it under the newly generated lookup key

homakov• 7 years ago

If old pw is considered leaked, new seed must be generated as well. Leaked password is the main reason why users would change passwords.

ranidu• 7 years ago

Awesome launch!

miguelmota• 7 years ago

The hedgehog library is completely unsafe considering that any third party library or browser extension loaded in the website using the SDK can loop through localStorage to read the entropy value therefore recreating the hd wallet and stealing the user's account.

xrd2• 7 years ago

This.

This is why FinneyFor uses an iFrame to keep the private key safe in localStorage only accessible from JS running on the same domain. FinneyFor uses postMessage to communicate between the parent frame when payment is processed, so you get the benefits of creating transactions in any kind of browser, but none of the risks as the parent rightfully points out.

https://finneyfor.com/

roneil17• 7 years ago

We documented this here: https://audiusproject.github.io/hedgehog-docs/#security-cons...

This is why we recommend that you audit all 3rd-party Javascript in your app for accesses to localstorage, and avoid sourcing 3rd-party javascript from uncontrolled origins (the code could be switched out from under you if it is not baked into your application)

The post message model is an interesting one - we looked into designing Hedgehog in that way, but decided it ultimately did not help solve this issue and created unnecessary complexity. If you include Javascript from libraries or other origins on your page, eg. Google Analytics, that Javascript could still post-message into your iframe.

Perhaps we are wrong here though! Is FinneyFor open-source? Would love to see how this is implemented.

Hedgehog Ethereum wallet: Build DApps like apps, without centralized keys

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