Digital Certificate Authentication Web-app

This is a centralized certificate authentication web-app. The app provides several functions. It could issue certificates and allows user to authenticate their certificates.

Deployment

config.yml should be included in the root directory. The config.yml file stores the keys of Google reCAPTCHA v3 and it should be like

SITE_KEY: [site key]
SECRET_KEY: [secret key]

The web-app has used Google reCAPTCHA v3 to protect the website. The hash value and tokens are stored in the database.

Before starting the server, it is of importance to setup the config file

Setup the virtual environment

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Initialize Database

flask --app digital-certificate init-db

Start production server

There are indeed several ways to start the server in production mode. Here provides one, gunicorn.

python3 -m pip install gunicorn
python3 -m gunicorn -w [number of processors] --bind [binding address] 'digital-certificate:create_app()'

API docs

The website is built by employing the flask framework. The website serves two things, allowing user to verify their certificates and re-download the certificates.

Authentication

Upload

• Endpoint: /api/upload
• Method: POST
• Response: JSON type data like.

{
    'message' : 'successful' | 'failed'
}

reponse the authentication result

The API only accepts file which could be submited by formData.

Download

Search File

• Endpoint: /api/search
• Method: POST
• Response: JSON type data like

{
    'message' : 'recaptcha failed' | 'id or date note found' | 'file not found' | 'ok',
    'token' : 'sha256 token(if avaliable)'
}

The search file api only accepts form data which contains the following fields id, date, recaptcha response. The date should be the following format: yyyy-mm-dd. The recaptcha response should come from Google reCAPTCHA The API will verify the users are genuine or not and the data they provide is faulty.

If all the checkpoints are passed, the response will contain a token for user to download their file. For further explaination, please refer the next API's description.

Download file

• Endpoint: /api/download
• Method: GET
• Response: pdf file

The token gotten from the API /api/search would be used here to download the file only once. If user want to download a file several times, they have to use the search file to re-obtain the token. The relevant information used to download the file would be embeded in the query string. The qury string would have id, date, and token.