docs-mdbook/src/developers/quick_start.md

Quick Start

In this guide we will set up a general-purpose TLS verifier ( a.k.a. the Notary), so that a Prover can notarize some TLS data and generate a proof which he then shows to a Verifier for selective disclosure.

So this guide will take you through the steps of:

• starting a Notary server
• running a Prover to notarize some web data
• running a Verifier to verify the notarized data

Preliminaries

Install rust

If you don't have rust installed yet, install it with rustup:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Guide

Start a Notary server:

git clone https://github.com/tlsnotary/notary-server
cd notary-server
cargo run --release

The Notary server will now be running in the background waiting for connections from a Prover. You can switch to another console to run the Prover.

For more information on how to configure the Notary server, please refer to this.

Run a simple Prover:

git clone https://github.com/tlsnotary/tlsn
cd tlsn/tlsn/examples
cargo run --release --example simple_prover

The notarization session usually takes a few moments and the resulting proof will be written to the "proof.json" file. The proof can then be passed on to the Verifier for verification.

The simple_prover notarizes https://example.com and redacts the USER_AGENT HTTP header from the proof for the Verifier. You can change the code in tlsn/tlsn/examples/simple_prover.rs to meet your needs:

• change which server the Prover connects to
• add or remove HTTP request headers
• redact other strings in the request or the response

⚠️ Please note that by default the Notary server expects that the cumulative size of the request and the server response is not more than 16KB.

Run a simple Verifier:

cargo run --release --example simple_verifier

This will verify the proof from the simple_prover (proof.json) and output the result to the console.

Note how the parts which the prover chose not to disclose will be shown as "X":

GET / HTTP/1.1
host: example.com
accept: */*
accept-encoding: identity
connection: close
user-agent: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX