HelloSign - "sign" into apps

Complete OAuth product with on legally binding data access.

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Inspiration

Any large organization deals with sharing of data and resources and the area of OAuth provides to facilitate the same are heavily dominated by large tech giants. This

  • keeps data in third party servers
  • does not provide complete control on application behavior
  • has no scope of customization or plugins

What it does

HelloAuth is

  • an open source (SaaS for 💰)
  • fully fledged OAuth2.0 Server
  • with client libraries in 2 languages, 4 frameworks
  • with scopes to share restricted data (e.g. only name, email etc)
  • integrates with HelloSign to make resource sharing process legally binding and force end users to sign document before granting access to resources
  • and security features to restrict origin and redirect URLs
  • with client libraries to integrate quickly in
    • golang
      • gin
      • fiber
    • nodejs
      • typescript
      • javascript

How we built it

Since the scope of the project was huge, I divided it into 3 parts.

Part 0 - Core OAuth2.0 I started with the core features that constitute the OAuth flow, dealing with creation and handling of client_id and client secrets, security configurations to control origin and redirect links, and scopes to allow fine control on what data should be shared.

Part 1 - Client Libraries Next, I went forward to implement the client libraries that allow tird party developers to interact with the primary OAuth server.

I wrote libraries for 4 usecases

  1. NodeJS - javascript
  2. NodeJS - typescript
  3. GoLang - gin
  4. GoLang - fiber

This demonstrates the scope of the integrations possible, and allows clients written in these applications to request resources from the OAuth server.

Part 2 - HelloSign Finally HelloSign is used as a signing layer which allows adding a legally binding step during sign-in, which requires the user to sign the supplied document else the resources are not shared. This is achieved by the nodejs sdk.

Challenges we ran into

  • Implementing the OAuth server from scratch was a major roadblock, as all the flows needed to be implemented from ground up, with token exchanges for resource being the tricky part.
  • Upon completion of step 0, I faced a major difficulty in writing the library for golang as I wanted to test the usability on a compiled langauge, faced a lot of issues in implementing a library in golang. NodeJS was easier, but shipping the same code for nodejs and typescript was tough.
  • The frontend of the OAuth server is written in vanilla html, css and javascript, and not react, so adding any logic was very tough

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • writing a server from scratch
  • writing libraries
  • integrating hellosign

What we learned

  • writing a backend from scratch
  • working with legally beginding scopes
  • writing golang libraries

What's next for HelloSign - "sign" into apps

  • to convert it into a fully fledged SaaS and merket it
  • allow linking other data models as resources in the OAuth server to allow sharing diverse resources.

All code resources: https://github.com/YashKumarVerma/hellosign-v1

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