README.md

Precise Proofs

Read the introduction on Precise-Proofs

Precise-Proofs is a library for creating Merkle proofs out of protobuf messages. It handles flattening of objects, ordering the fields by label and creating shareable and independently verifiable proofs.

This library takes arbitrary protobuf messages and makes sure a Merkle tree can be reliable calculated from the values with each value representing a leaf in the tree.

{
    "Amount": "$1500",
    "InvoiceDate": "2018-03-01",
    "DueDate": "2018-08-01",
    "Country": "USA",
    "Supplier": "Arbor Tree Inc",
    "Buyer": "ACME Paper Inc",
    "Status": "APPROVED"
}

Above example would result in the following tree:

Why protobuf?

Google's protobuf is a space efficient and fast format to serialize data in a portable way. It's easy to generate JSON out of

Binary fields encoding

For []byte fields the default encoding used for tree and proof generation is Hexadecimal using https://godoc.org/github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/common/hexutil

Usage:

See below code sample (examples/simple.go) for a usage example. For detailed usage, check godocs.

    // ExampleDocument is a protobuf message
    document := documentspb.ExampleDocument{
        Value1:      1,
        ValueA:      "Foo",
        ValueB:      "Bar",
        ValueBytes1: []byte("foobar"),
        Name: &documentspb.Name{
            First: "Hello, ",
            Last:  "World",
        },
        PaddingA:    "WillBePadded",
    }

    blake2b256, _ := blake2b.New256([]byte{1, 2, 3, 4})
    doctree, _ := proofs.NewDocumentTree(proofs.TreeOptions{Hash: sha256.New(), LeafHash: blake2b256})
    doctree.AddLeavesFromDocument(&document)
    doctree.Generate()
    fmt.Printf("Generated tree: %s\n", doctree.String())

    // Generate the proof for a field. In this case the field called "ValueA".
    proof, _ := doctree.CreateProof("valueA")
    proofJson, _ := json.Marshal(proof)
    fmt.Println("Proof:\n", string(proofJson))

    // Validate the proof that was just generated
    valid, _ := doctree.ValidateProof(&proof)
    fmt.Printf("Proof validated: %v\n", valid)

    // Fixed Length Tree
    doctree2 := proofs.NewDocumentTree(proofs.TreeOptions{Hash: sha256.New(), LeafHash: blake2b256, TreeDepth: 5})
    fmt.Printf("\n\nNon empty leaves number of generated tree should be %d\n", 1<<5)
    doctree2.AddLeavesFromDocument(&document)
    doctree2.Generate()
    fmt.Printf("Non empty leaves number of the tree is %d\n", len(doctree2.GetLeaves()))

    // Generate the actual proof for a field. In this case the field called "ValueA".
    proof, _ = doctree2.CreateProof("valueA")
    proofJson, _ = json.Marshal(proof)
    fmt.Println("Proof:\n", string(proofJson))

    // Validate the proof that was just generated
    valid, _ = doctree2.ValidateProof(&proof)

Development

Building protobuf messages

If the protobuf messages are ever changed, the recommended procedure is to build them via the targets provided in the Makefile.

make install_protoc_deps to install the protoc deps.

make proto to compile the proto fies.