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Identity validation in Chatwoot

Identity verification is an important security feature that helps ensure that conversations between customers and support agents are private and secure. By verifying the identities of both parties, identity validation helps prevent impersonation and unauthorized access.

If your users can log into your app, it's always recommended to enable identity verification. Chatwoot uses an HMAC-based identity verification. It is a cryptographic algorithm that uses a secret key (provided by Chatwoot) and a unique identifier to generate a code; this code can then be used to verify the user on the front end.

Generating HMAC

To generate the HMAC you need to get the secret key for your Chatwoot inbox. The key can be found in Settings > Inboxes > Settings > Configuration > Identity Validation

HMAC Secret

To use HMAC for identity validation in your web widget, you'll need to generate an HMAC using this key. You can generate this HMAC using any programming language in the backend. Most languages have built-in cryptographic functions to generate the token; if not popular implementations always exist. You can find examples of popular programming languages at the end of this page.

Verifying the HMAC

Once you've generated an HMAC for an identifier using the key above, you can use the HMAC to validate the identity of the sender. To do this, send the HMAC along with the identifier to your Chatwoot server via the SDK.

Verification on the web

window.$chatwoot.setUser(`<unique-identifier-key-of-the-user>`, {
name: "", // Name of the user
email: "", // Email of the user
identifier_hash: "<identifier-hash>" // HMAC value, which is generated using inbox identifier (obtained from inbox settings ) and unique-identifier-key that you supply for the contact.
}

If the HMACs match, you can be confident that the person who sent the identifier is authorized to do so. All unverified users will show up with an alert mark stating that their identity is not verified.

Unverified user

Verification in React Native

You can integrate identity verification in React Native as well. You can find the documentation to setup Chatwoot for React Native here

const App = () => {
const user = {
identifier: "<unique-identifier-key-of-the-user>",
name: "John Samuel",
email: "john@gmail.com",
identifier_hash: "<identifier-hash>",
};

return (
<ChatWootWidget
websiteToken="WEBSITE_TOKEN"
baseUrl="https://app.chatwoot.com"
isModalVisible={showWidget}
user={user}
/>
);
};

Enforcing verification

In case you want to enforce verification for all users, you can do so by enabling the Enforce User Identity Validation option in the inbox settings.

Enforce verification

If this option is enabled any incoming message from an unverified user will be rejected.

PHP

<?php

// Define your key and message
$key = 'your-secret-token-for-hmac';
$identifier = 'unique-identifier-of-the-user';

// Generate the HMAC
$identifier_hash = hash_hmac('sha256', $identifier, $key);
?>

Javascript (Node.js)

const crypto = require("crypto");

// Define your key and identifier
const key = "your-secret-token-for-hmac";
const identifier = "unique-identifier-key-of-the-user";

// Generate the HMAC
const identifierHash = crypto
.createHmac("sha256", key)
.update(identifier)
.digest("hex");

Ruby

require 'openssl'

# Define your key and identifier
key = 'your-secret-token-for-hmac'
identifier = 'unique-identifier-of-the-user'

# Generate the HMAC
identifier_hash = OpenSSL::HMAC.hexdigest('sha256', key, identifier)

Elixir

# Define your key and identifier
key = 'your-secret-token-for-hmac'
identifier = 'unique-identifier-of-the-user'

# Generate the HMAC
signature = :crypto.hmac(:sha256, key, identifier)

identifier_hash = Base.encode16(signature, case: :lower)

Golang

package main

import (
"crypto/hmac"
"crypto/sha256"
"encoding/hex"
"fmt"
)

func main() {
// Define your key and identifier
key := []byte("your-secret-token-for-hmac")
identifier := []byte("unique-identifier-of-the-user")

// Generate the HMAC
hash := hmac.New(sha256.New, key)
hash.Write(identifier)
identifierHash := hex.EncodeToString(hash.Sum(nil))

// Print the HMAC
fmt.Println(identifierHash)
}

Python

import hashlib
import hmac

# Define your key and identifier
secret = bytes('your-secret-token-for-hmac', 'utf-8')
identifier = bytes('unique-identifier-of-the-user', 'utf-8')

# Generate the HMAC
hash = hmac.new(secret, identifier, hashlib.sha256)
identifier_hash = hash.hexdigest()