Hyperledger Global Forum 2022

In a private, permissioned blockchain, all participants must be identified. Hyperledger Fabric uses a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to manage these identities. For testing purposes, the Cryptogen tool can be used to initially create the crypto material. However, for a production network, its use is strongly discouraged. One important reason is that the entire lifecycle of the crypto material cannot be managed. Due to the limited documentation, the barrier to entry is high to build a production-ready PKI in Hyperledger Fabric. We at PostFinance TechLab have taken the leap and replaced Cryptogen with Hyperledger Fabric CA. In our presentation, we will explain the biggest differences and most importantly the benefits of Fabric CA. In addition, we will explain many of the lessons we learned during the trial & error implementation process with concrete examples and a demo. We break down the problem of moving to Fabric CA into individual steps and show how we built a state-of-the-art PKI that interoperates with the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain. We plan to make our learnings available for the official Hyperledger Fabric documentation.