HALO Identity

HALO is a system of components for implementing decentralized identity designed around privacy, security, and collaboration requirements.

• The HALO Shell manages the user's identity and connected devices. It's available as a component.
• The HALO SDK is part of the DXOS client library and provides user authentication, identity, and contact management capabilities.
• The HALO protocol supports the verification, transport, and exchange of identity information between networked peers.

Features

• Public/private key-pair authentication mechanism integrated into ECHO
• Passwordless log in
• Local-first credentials and key storage
• Multi-device synchronization of identities, credentials, ECHO spaces

Establishing user identity

There are two ways a user can establish their identity (login) with DXOS on any given device.

1. Visiting any DXOS-powered application in the browser will immediately initialize a HALO identity for the user.
2. Accepting a device invitation will synchronize the user's identity from another device.

In the future, we plan to support recovering an identity using a seed phrase, sometimes referred to as paper key recovery.

Shell

Shell is a set of components and pre-built workflows for managing ECHO spaces, invitations, and identity.

It runs and renders within an iframe managed by the DXOS client.

The shell can be invoked via the client API.

Scenarios:

• View and edit the user's basic profile
• Invite someone to a space
• Accept an invitation to join another space
• Join another device to the user's HALO identity
• Accept a device invitation to join the current device to an existing HALO identity

You can experiment with the Shell at https://halo.dxos.org.

The shell appears overtop the calling UI and looks like a full screen dialog panel.

Device Invitations

Device Invitations allow users to synchronize their identity and data across multiple devices or applications (every app is a separate device, one per domain and browser profile). Invitations are generated by the user's primary device and can be accepted by any other device, including mobile devices and the DXOS CLI.

Next steps

How to use the HALO Shell in code:

• Use Shell with Typescript
• Use Shell with React

How to read the HALO identity in code:

• Use the useIdentity hook in react
• Use the client.halo.profile field in TypeScript