did web method

[praveensankar]

Is there any registry which stores all the web method dids and provides the resolution function to the agents ?

[sk91]

@praveensankar you are looking for something like universal resolver?

[praveensankar]

It basically boils down to DNS lookup operation. Is that correct ?

[sk91]

A http request:

https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-method-web/#read-resolve

2.5.2 Read (Resolve)
The following steps MUST be executed to resolve the DID document from a Web DID:

• Replace ":" with "/" in the method specific identifier to obtain the fully qualified domain name and optional path.
• Generate an HTTPS URL to the expected location of the DID document by prepending https://.
• If no path has been specified in the URL, append /.well-known.
• Append /did.json to complete the URL.
• Perform an HTTP GET request to the URL using an agent that can successfully negotiate a secure HTTPS connection, which enforces the security requirements as described in § 2.6 Security and privacy considerations .

[praveensankar]

If I understand correctly for every DID lookup, we have to issue HTTP GET request which fetches the corresponding json file from the website. HTTP GET request will in turn rely on the DNS servers and caches to find the ip address of the domain and the corresponding resource. This whole DNS lookup delay is present here compared to directly fetching it from any standard systems such as blockchains or distributed databases.

[sk91]

yes, but can you describe your usecase that will make this delay meaningful for you?

You can always cache the did documents for repeated resolution for reasonable timeframe. Did documents do not tend to change quickly

[praveensankar]

I am trying to understand the underlying working. I am not planning to applying it in any scenario yet. Thanks for the information.

[mirceanis]

@praveensankar In the case of veramo the agent can act as a registry for the did:web identifiers it manages.
Take a look at WebDidDocRouter in the @veramo/remote-server package.
It is an expressjs router that can answer the .well-known/did.json request.
Note that it does not store JSON files, but builds the did.json response on the fly out of the known keys and services registered for the respective did:web

For quick experimentation, you can try to use the @veramo/cli. The current version of the CLI sets up a temporary did:web through ngrok when you use the veramo server command.