Identity Verification

Use identity verification to secure your chat from user impersonation

This step is optional but strongly recommended before you're ready for live production chats. Identity Verification ensures bad actors can't impersonate your customers to see their issues and conversations.

This is done by adding a verification for the identity of the user sending a message through the chat widget, to prevent your customers from manually changing their email in the frontend to impersonate each other.

Pylon is not unique on this front - because a user's identity in the chat is determined client-side, any chat is susceptible to users spoofing their email.

Generate an Identity Secret
Starting from your Chat Widgets page, navigating to your Chat Widget's Settings tab. In the "Identity Verification Secret" section, click "Generate Secret". This will be the only time you will see this key. Save the key somewhere safe, such as a password manager. If you lose your key, you’ll need to regenerate it and replace the key later.
Setup Backend
In your backend, hash the user’s email address using HMAC-SHA256 with the secret you just generated. Note that the secret is a hex string and must be decoded to text before use.
Here are some code snippets to help:

const { createHmac } = require("node:crypto");

const secret = "GENERATED_IDENTITY_SECRET";
const email = "CHAT_USER_EMAIL";

const secretBytes = Buffer.from(secret, "hex");
const verificationHash = createHmac("sha256", secretBytes)
  .update(email)
  .digest("hex");

import hmac
import hashlib

def sign_message_with_hmac(message, secret):
    secret_bytes = bytes.fromhex(secret)
    signature = hmac.new(secret_bytes, message.encode(), hashlib.sha256).hexdigest()
    return signature

package auth

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

func SignMessageWithHMAC(message, secret string) (*string, error) {
	secretBytes, err := hex.DecodeString(secret)
	if err != nil {
		return nil, errors.New("unable to decode secret")
	}

	h := hmac.New(sha256.New, secretBytes)
	h.Write([]byte(message))
	signature := h.Sum(nil)

	signedMsg := hex.EncodeToString(signature)

	return &signedMsg, nil
}

Send this hash to the Frontend and set it on the window object:
```
window.pylon.chat_settings.email_hash = HMAC_HASH
```

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Last updated 16 days ago

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