OpenCheck

OpenCheck logo
Demo

Inspiration

Application users are straying away from creating or using their big tech identity accounts to sign-up for services – due to trust and privacy concerns. Moreover, many companies have to spend lots of resources combatting bots and ensuring that their users are of age. Lastly, developers spend days adding “Sign in with Google”, “Sign in with Facebook” and other social identity providers to their applications.

We were on a mission to make adding sign-up options more secure, headache-free, and give developers the freedom to understand their users without developing their own complicated authentication and AI-based identity verification. One API call is all it takes to verify that a new user's email is legit. No costs.

What it does

We save developers time by handling the heavy lifting. We handle email verification and give developers the freedom to verify their users by adding one line of code to their applications.

JS example:

const response = await fetch(‘api.opencheck.com/check/?email=jane.doe@example.com’, { method: “POST” }); const { trustScore, name, email } = response;

Our users’ credentials are securely stored and we allow users to build identity proof through several means: linking multiple social accounts, uploading government IDs, adding their PGP keys, and proving their date of birth through the power of AI.

This gives developers the ability to check whether emails are verified (via an open-public API), it allows them to vet their users, mitigate bot traffic, and be KnowYourCustomer (“KYC”) compliant within seconds, not months.

OpenCheck is extremely flexible. You can use it as an indie developer for your small MVP or for your enterprise-level fintech account verification service.

How I built it

Landing page:

Template

Application:

The client-side was developed using React, Material UI, and firebase. The monolithic HTTP RESTful API was developed using Redis, Express, Nodemailer, SendGrid, and Node.JS We managed developer environments using Docker Compose and deployed using Firebase Hosting.

User-side: Account Portal Sign Up page Developer-side: Developer Portal Documented API for OpenCheck consumers

We stored credentials in a redis datastore and handled functions like verification, adding linked accounts, and uploading data via our Express routers.

Challenges I ran into

Technical difficulties, installing dependencies, interoperability issues, and parallelizing work effectively.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

Successfully tested each of the endpoints Managing sleep Building a working product.

What We learned

Danilo I learned how to leverage the power of open source React templates to create an enterprise level website in a few hours.

Waleed Handling merge conflicts in Git from terminal. How to build a backend server using Express and Node. Product ideation, planning and research.

Filip I had a great time. I improved my JavaScript and React skills. This was my first hackathon.

What's next for OpenCheck

Additional government issues IDs, sign in partners such as banks, schools, to provide more options to increase a users security level; this will require developer-level API access.

Integrate OpenCheck in applications like Shopify, Instagram, and Facebook with a prominent number of bots and fake accounts.

The app would ideally hold sensitive information from millions of users, so security and privacy are a huge concern. Investigate defensive methods.

Integrate new emerging technologies such as ML and blockchain, if possible.

Deploy our own OAuth 2 Provider and OpenID connect server so users can sign in using OpenCheck.

Demo: https://open-check-85d00.web.app/account