Summary
StellarAuth is a developer API and user application service for easily and securely assigning Stellar accounts to your users from within your app. Kind of like Authy (2FA) for Stellar, but also a lot like a combination of Sign In with Apple and Apple Card. Essentially it’s a secure way to give your users a Stellar account which you can send requests to and they can accept or decline in an intuitive interface. You won’t store secrets, we don’t have access to secrets and the user won’t have to deal with anything they're not already familiar with.
Goals
StellarAuth is a simple yet ambitious project borne out of the frustrations and dangers of creating, securing and providing access to thousands of Stellar accounts across various apps and services. The goal is simply to assign a Stellar account to each of your users in a similar fashion to how they might add 2FA to their account. The user can claim their Stellar account after which your app can send XDR requests to that key for the user to transparently accept or reject right from within a separate Authy-like application. This offloads the security concerns of storing thousands of key secrets without unloading that risk in raw form to the user. Their experience remains familiar via a singular passcode entered locally on their device. No one entity can gain control of any key but all must work together to send and sign transactions. It’s a beautiful and elegant solution which will simplify and secure your applications and allow you to focus on running your business and your users to simply use your apps.
Timeline
We’ve already got a strong start and an alpha version on the testnet is ready for poking. As time progresses, feedback comes in and hopefully funding is acquired the service will mature with more robust features and use cases. By year’s end we’re looking to be integrated into a few production applications and be working closely with developers to ensure our service is meeting their needs and solving the problem of Stellar account management in a variety of use cases.
Description
“What does your project enable users to do?”
Managing large numbers of Stellar accounts is tedious when done well and dangerous when done casually. StellarAuth inserts itself into this problem by providing an intuitive and powerful solution of allowing developers to assign users a Stellar address without requiring them to store any secret or private information. Those secrets are transparently handed back to the user packaged cleanly inside an intuitive and familiar 2FA like native application.
“Why is your project valuable for Stellar?”
Building with Stellar is pretty easy. Securing Stellar accounts on the other hand is very hard and yet it’s imperative you get it right in the case your application is successful. Developers cannot afford to get security wrong. It looks bad on them and it looks bad on Stellar. Aside from the benefits of simplifying the security issue however StellarAuth also provides an intuitive onramp into the Stellar ecosystem for users unfamiliar or disinterested. Most of your users simply won’t care or be qualified to store secrets, sign transactions, pass over xdrs, remember 24 word pass phrases etc, they just want to use your app. StellarAuth provides a simple onramp and ongoing access into the ocean of benefits Stellar offers without your users ever even needing to know the name Stellar. This is huge, adoption has been one of the biggest barriers Stellar has faced to date and StellarAuth provides an elegant answer.
“How does your project utilize Stellar?”
StellarAuth is a utility on top of Stellar. It’s a Stellar project through and through. From the Keystore files encrypted by a user’s passphrase to the XDR endpoints to send your users transactions, every corner of StellarAuth is a Stellar project aimed at getting people to user Stellar, whether they realize it or not.
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