Local Hashing Service Hosting

Clients using privacy-preserving (blinded) mode will have their own local hashing service instance. This service takes unblinded demographics information and returns a hashed payload for use with the blinded Identity API methods. See Privacy-Preserving (Blinded) Mode for details.

This article describes how to host and install your own copy of the local hashing service.

Docker

The local hashing service is provided as a stand alone web service via a docker image in Docker Hub.

If you have Docker installed, you can pull the service for local testing using:

docker pull careevolution/bmpi-hashing-service

Configuration

The Docker service lets you configure which port(s) are available:

Additionally there are several environment variables you will need to configure:

A sample docker-compose.yaml configuration is shown below.

services:
  bmpi-hashing-service:
    image: careevolution/bmpi-hashing-service:latest
    ports:
      # HTTPS port (using a self-signed certificate)
      - "7001:7001"
      
      # HTTP port
      - "7002:7002"

    environment:
      # set HASH__KEY to the value provided to you by CareEvolution. Note the double underscore in the name
      HASH__KEY: "${HASH__KEY}"
      
      # this make the logs a nice human readable format, remove it or set the value to "json" for machine-readable logs
      Logging__Console__FormatterName: "simple"
      
    # prevent the user that runs the hashing service from having unneeded permissions
    cap_drop:
      - ALL

Endpoints

The following table shows all endpoints available on the hashing service. All endpoints are available on both the HTTP and HTTPS ports.

Monitoring and Logging

The local hashing service generates run-time metrics using Prometheus so that you can monitor your instance(s) for health, performance, load, etc. Point your metrics collector to /metrics.

The local hashing service writes JSON logs to STDOUT and should be available in whatever hosting solution you use. To generate logs in a human friendly format, set the Logging__Console__FormatterName environment variable to simple (as shown in the docker-compose.yaml above).