Components Used

Mydex CIC is committed to using open source components and supporting open source software development across a wide range of community endeavours.

The rationale is simple for us, greater security, many eyes on the same code all driven by making it safe and secure. There is also the reality of lower cost in terms of accessing such amazing capability, the ongoing development and support of functionality and the ability to help shape its future and if necessary make local decisions to meet the needs of our community. We obviously configure it to meet our needs and yes we extend it but we don’t customise it.

We have set out below each component we use across our different environments and the broad categories and elements we classify them under.

Platform Services

• Corporate Websites - This is our publishing site for market information and our blog.
• Developer Documentation (this site) - Where we publish information on our personal data and identity services API’s and our master data schema. Primarily used by developers working in Subscribing organisations either integrating to existing back end services or developing new apps and services.
• External Integration Hub - Mydex integrates a range of external services into its platform including services like the postcode address file, open source data and provides a bridge for members to collect and update other services on the internet that are under their control. The External Integration Hub is designed to make it possible for anyone to build out adaptors to external services and map them into the Mydex Platform. The goal is easy access for our members to their existing services and to simplify API services for application developers using the Mydex platform who want to integrate open data sources and external services into their applications easily.
• Identity Services - Our API services that support multiprotocol identity services that Subscribing organisations and relying parties can use. This is what gives our members a portable privacy friendly MydexID that supports the principle open standard protocols in use across the internet today.
• Inclued Platform - Our safe and secure platform that enables two-way engagement between citizens and Subscribing organisations is built ontop of our core Personal Data Store infrastructure. It improves access to services, enables participation, and builds community through personalised notifications and information.
• Master Reference Data Services - These are our API services designed to save everyone time and effort and prevent duplication for all. We provide a series of look up services such as Post Codes, Country Codes and other directories and services to make it easy to integrate open data and other services into our platform.
• Personal Data Exchange - Our API services for secure data exchange and application services that our Subscribing organisations use.
• Personal Data Store - Includes our personal data store front end application and browser extension that our members use to explore their personal data.
• Web App Generator & Shells Our framework of open source components to deliver consistent, safe and secure user experiences and to embed good practice from the design and UX guides of Government Digital Service and Scottish Government Digital First Service Standard.

Filters

We have classified the Mydex Platform components into some broad groups that are fundamental building blocks. They are as follows:

• API - The way everyone connects to and works with the platform. Its end to end encrypted using open standards.
• Development - The tools we use to develop inside Mydex CIC.
• Encryption - The encryption components we use. For more information on how our encryption and security works please see our security model briefing.
• Identity - The elements that deliver our identity protocol support.
• Infrastructure - The foundations of the platform that underpin all that we do from zero touch deployment, to systems administration.
• Platform - the platform application frameworks we use.
• Testing - how we deliver automated testing.

Within each of these groups we break these down further into specific elements and the components we use within each element.

Simply click on the filters at the top of the listing to see which components are used in each environment.

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API

REST

SlimPHP

Slim is a PHP micro framework that helps you quickly write simple yet powerful APIs.
External Integration Hub Identity Services Master Reference Data Services Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores Web App Generator & Shells

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Development

Version Control

git

Git is a version control system that is used for storing application code in 'repositories'. These repositories provide an ability for developers to collaborate on the same code, give an audit trail and the ability to revert changes.
Corporate Site Developer Documentation External Integration Hub Identity Services Inclued Platform Master Reference Data Services Mydex Internal Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores Web App Generator & Shells

NPM

npm is the standard package manager for Node.js.
External Integration Hub Identity Services Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores Web App Generator & Shells

Composer

Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will manage (install/update) them for you.
External Integration Hub Identity Services Master Reference Data Services Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores Web App Generator & Shells

Documentation

phpDocumentor

phpDocumentor is the de-facto documentation application for PHP projects.
External Integration Hub Identity Services Master Reference Data Services Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores Web App Generator & Shells

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Encryption

Database

SQLCipher

SQLCipher adds encryption capabilities to SQLite, allowing the ability to store encrypted SQLite databases.
Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores

PKI

GPG

GnuPG (GPG) is an open source implementation of OpenPGP, which allows for the encryption and decryption of data using Public/Private keys.
Mydex Internal

SOPS

Simple and flexible tool for managing secrets. SOPS is an editor of encrypted files that supports YAML, JSON, ENV, INI and BINARY formats and encrypts with AWS KMS, GCP KMS, Azure Key Vault, age, and PGP.
Mydex Internal

SSL

OpenSSL

OpenSSL is the opensource implementation of the Secure Sockets Layer standard, which allows for encryption of the transmission of data between networks.
Corporate Site Developer Documentation External Integration Hub Identity Services Master Reference Data Services Mydex Internal Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores Web App Generator & Shells

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Identity

OpenIDconnect

Ory Hydra

Ory Hydra is a hardened and certified OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect provider.
External Integration Hub Identity Services

Vouch Proxy

An SSO and OAuth / OIDC login solution for Nginx using the auth_request module.
Identity Services Mydex Contributed Mydex Internal

SAML

SimpleSAMLphp

SimpleSAMLphp is an application written in native PHP that deals with authentication. The main focus of SimpleSAMLphp is providing support for SAML 2.0 as an Identity Provider (IdP) and as a Service Provider (SP).
Developer Documentation Identity Services Mydex Internal Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores Web App Generator & Shells

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Infrastructure

Application Servers

NGINX

Nginx is a fast and lightweight HTTP daemon for serving websites.
Corporate Site Developer Documentation External Integration Hub Identity Services Mydex Internal Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores Web App Generator & Shells

Backup

Duplicity

Duplicity is a tool for backing up, validating and restoring data. It supports full and incremental backups, with an added encryption layer for security.
Corporate Site Developer Documentation External Integration Hub Identity Services Mydex Internal Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores

Cluster

NFS

NFS provides the ability to share a server's filesystem to 'clients' over a network.
External Integration Hub Identity Services Mydex Internal Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores

Communications

OpenDKIM

OpenDKIM is a community effort to develop and maintain a C library for producing DKIM-aware applications and an open source milter for providing DKIM service.
Identity Services Mydex Internal

OpenSSH

OpenSSH is an implementation of the SSH protocol, which allows for encrypted commands to be issued to a remote server over a network. SSH is used at Mydex extensively by humans, robots as well as some of the tools already listed above (such as Fabric).
Corporate Site Developer Documentation External Integration Hub Identity Services Mydex Internal Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores

Postfix

Postfix is an open source SMTP (mail) system. It is used for outbound as well as some inbound e-mail channels from mydex's infrastructure.
Developer Documentation Identity Services Mydex Internal Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores

Compute, Storage and Network

Amazon Web Services

Mydex consumes the following services from AWS in order to serve the platform:

• VPC - virtual private LAN for networking layout and intercommunication between servers.
• ECS - Amazon’s container service, which runs the open source Docker engine to orchestrate our containers.
• EC2 instances - These are the clusters of servers that run the ECS Docker containers. These run Amazon Linux, based on the open source RedHat/CentOS Linux distributions.
• ECR - Amazon’s Docker image repository (similar to Docker Hub) for storing Docker images.
• ALB - Application load balancers, which route traffic to the compute cluster and containers.
• RDS - Runs MySQL and other database services.
• ElastiCache - runs the open source product Redis, for efficient and fast session/cache storage.
• S3 - used for auxiliary tools such as Cloudwatch configuration and other object file storage.
• EFS - clustered, shared storage across physical data centers for non-ephemeral data.
• SES - SMTP endpoints for sending e-mail and SMS notifications from the microservices.
• SNS and Lambda - for on-demand serverless actions and notification triggering systems.
• IAM - access control/role/policy management for personnel and cross-component interaction.
• Cloudwatch - for log aggregation, metrics and monitoring/alarms.
• Cloudtrail - for audit trails of changes made to the platform.
• AWS Backup - for backing up of certain components.
• Certificate Manager - for SSL certificate issuance.
• AWS Inspector - for network interface/security group/service exposure scanning and analysis.
• Route53 - for DNS.

Corporate Site Developer Documentation External Integration Hub Identity Services Inclued Platform Master Reference Data Services Mydex Internal Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores Web App Generator & Shells

Configuration

GitLab

GitLab is an open source end-to-end software development platform with built-in version control, issue tracking, code review, CI/CD, and more.
External Integration Hub Identity Services Mydex Internal Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores

Ansible

Ansible is a simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.
Corporate Site Developer Documentation External Integration Hub Identity Services Mydex Internal Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores

Terraform

Mydex uses Terraform to orchestrate and automate provisioning, management and recovery of infrastructure.
Corporate Site Developer Documentation External Integration Hub Identity Services Mydex Internal Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores Web App Generator & Shells

OpenTofu

Mydex is in the process of migrating from Terraform to OpenTofu for infrastructure management, and has signed the pledge as a supporter of the project.
Corporate Site Developer Documentation External Integration Hub Identity Services Mydex Internal Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores Web App Generator & Shells

Database

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system that uses and extends the SQL language combined with many features that safely store and scale the most complicated data workloads.
Mydex Internal

Intrusion Detection & Virus Protection

OSSEC

OSSEC is a scalable, multi-platform, open source Host-based Intrusion Detection System (HIDS).
Corporate Site Developer Documentation External Integration Hub Identity Services Inclued Platform Master Reference Data Services Mydex Contributed Mydex Internal Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores Web App Generator & Shells

Trivy

Trivy is a simple and comprehensive scanner for vulnerabilities in container images, file systems, and Git repositories, as well as for configuration issues. Trivy detects vulnerabilities of OS packages (Alpine, RHEL, CentOS, etc.) and language-specific packages (Bundler, Composer, npm, yarn, etc.). In addition, Trivy scans Infrastructure as Code (IaC) files such as Terraform, Dockerfile and Kubernetes, to detect potential configuration issues that expose your deployments to the risk of attack.
Corporate Site Developer Documentation External Integration Hub Identity Services Inclued Platform Master Reference Data Services Mydex Internal Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores Web App Generator & Shells

OWASP ZAProxy

OWASP ZAP is an open-source web application security scanner.
Corporate Site External Integration Hub Identity Services Master Reference Data Services Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores Web App Generator & Shells

OWASP ZAP Historic Dashboard

Stores ZAP reports historically and enables comparison of current ZAP results against the most recent for changes in alerts.
Corporate Site External Integration Hub Identity Services Master Reference Data Services Mydex Contributed Personal Data Exchange Personal Data Stores Web App Generator & Shells

TestSSL.sh

testssl.sh is a free command line tool which checks a server's service on any port for the support of TLS/SSL ciphers, protocols as well as recent cryptographic flaws and more.
Mydex Internal Mydex Contributed