Explaining wallet access

Overview

When setting tutorial-ledger we gave everyone permission to access anyone's record.

For example, banks could transfer balance from wallets that don't belong to them.

In reality, this will never be the desired behavior.

And this was done only for tutorial purposes (to ease the learning process of basic concepts).

But now it's time to address wallet security.

How we started

Initially, in the lesson that covered creating a ledger, we gave everyone a maximum level of permissions.

This means anyone (any signer) was able to do anything inside the tutorial-ledger.

We allowed this during the ledger creation process:

$ minka ledger create
? Handle: tutorial-ledger
? Enter access content: Press <enter> to launch your preferred editor.
...

And we confirmed these JSON permissions:

[
  {
    "record": "any",
    "action": "any"
  }
]

The effect

Let's say we have 2 signers and each of them has their own wallet:

• bank-1-signer has bank-1-wallet and
• bank-2-signer has bank-2-wallet

We would expect that each bank only has access to their own wallet.

However, with current access rules it is possible for bank-1-signer to create transfer intent from bank-2-wallet to any other wallet.

Basically, bank-1 can control the funds from bank-2.

To stop this from happening we need to add some access rules (which we will do in our next lesson).