Setup Identify Verification

If you are using our SDK in your web app to identify your users, you might want to make sure users are verified. Let's see how to do that using a signature flow.

Quick Access

How does identify verification works?

Requirements of Identify Verification

Troubleshooting

How does identify verification works?

Identify verification is an additional step in the identify flow making sure that users has been identified by your own account system.

In fact, your web-app use our Javascript SDK method to identify users. This also means that the Javascript SDK method could be triggered by someone using a browser developer console. Let's illustrate this two situations.

Case 1 : John access your app

Your web app loads, John is identified in your app as john.doe@company.com
Your web app call Jimo SDK method like so window['jimo'].push(['do', 'identify', ["john.doe@company.com"]]);
John is correctly identified by your app in Jimo as john.doe@company.com

Case 2 : Dev (the spoofer) access your app

You web app loads, Dev is identified in your app as dev@malicious.com
Your web app call Jimo SDK method like so window['jimo'].push(['do', 'identify', ["dev@malicious.com"]]);
Dev is correctly identified by your app in Jimo as dev@malicious.com
Dev opens the browser developer console while on your app and call Jimo SDK method like so window['jimo'].push(['do', 'identify', ["john.doe@company.com"]]);
Dev is now identified in Jimo as john.doe@company.com

Requirements of Identify Verification

The verification feature requires you to sign the identifier you provide to the identify JavaScript SDK method, with a secret key. As this secret key must not be know to any public user, you need to keep this on your backend code only.

Therefore, only your backend will be able to sign the identifier that will be passed to the identify Javascript SDK method. The only requirement for using User Verification is the ability to sign emails from your own backend code, with the secret key Jimo generates for you in your website settings.

Setup Identify Verification

1. Get your secret key

In order for your backend to sign the identifier, you'll need a secret key.

Login to Jimo dashboard
Navigate to Installation Settings
Enable the "Identify Verification"
Copy the secret key

2. Sign identifiers

Once your have your secret key, you can use it to sign identifiers.

Quick reminder : We recommend to use unguessable identifier when setting up the identify in Jimo to increase the security of your integration. Please check our Identify users notice for more information.

To keep this notice simple, we will demonstrate the signing using an email as the identifier, which is again not recommended.

Here's how to sign the identifier from your backend using Nodejs (make sure to adapt according to the technology your are using for your backend).

const crypto = require("crypto");

// Put you secret key here (keep it private!)
// Notice: the one below is an example, yours will be different
const secretKey = "894c7ec1c3a9e3bb4a243d2d3f79591fefc23d3eca1676a4e0b13ba8f454eff6";

// This method signs an email, using your global 'secretKey'
function signEmail(email) {
  return crypto.createHmac("sha256", secretKey).update(email).digest("hex");
}

// Sign your email
// Notice: the email below is an example, yours will be sourced from the authenticated user
const signedIdentifier = signEmail("john.doe@company.com");

console.log("Your signed identifier is:", signedIdentifier);

Make sure you generate signatures with the HMAC-SHA256 algorithm. Any other HMAC digest is not accepted and will be refused by Jimo when provided.

Example based on the snippet provided above

const secretKey = "894c7ec1c3a9e3bb4a243d2d3f79591fefc23d3eca1676a4e0b13ba8f454eff6"

signEmail("john.doe@company.com") // fd930a0d54482e82e4cd2e6d112bb2db8d50287a2d91387226c4e6ab8a5f403b

3. Pass signed identifier to the identify Javascript SDK method

Once your signed identifiers is generated, make sure to pass it every time you call the Identify Javascript SDK method like so

window['jimo'].push(['do', 'identify', [identifier, null, signedIdentifier]]);

Example (from above)

window['jimo'].push(['do', 'identify', ["john.doe@company.com", null, "fd930a0d54482e82e4cd2e6d112bb2db8d50287a2d91387226c4e6ab8a5f403b"]]);

Troubleshooting

I'm getting a IDENTIFY_VERIFICATION_SIGNATURE_SIGNIN_FAILED error

Please make sure that

You have passed the signed identifiers as the 3rd parameters of the Identify Javascript SDK method
You have correctly signed the identifiers using your secret key

I'm getting a IDENTIFY_VERIFICATION_SIGNATURE_SIGNUP_FAILED error

Please make sure that

You have passed the signed identifiers as the 3rd parameters of the Identify Javascript SDK method
You have correctly signed the identifiers using your secret key

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Last updated 5 months ago