Leveraging RingCaptcha for SMS User Authentication with Layer

The phone number is shared across an intimate spectrum of friends, colleagues and family — the uniqueness and longevity of the phone number, plus the intimate social graph make the phone number simply the best form of user identity. An SMS requiring a PIN code can authenticate ownership or identity pretty fast and easy.

RingCaptcha is the simplest, most reliable way to authenticate and onboard users on a worldwide scale. Layer is a complete building block for communications — allowing any developer to embed chat functionalities within their app. Marry the two for a seamless communications experience, from authentication to continued messaging.

Integration Options

Chat applications (such as WhatsApp, Line, and KakaoTalk,) realize the importance of the phone number as the unique identifier, so understanding how to integrate between Layer and RingCaptcha is important.

Your choice on how you prefer to integrate the two really depends on your need to customize versus your time available. If you have the time and expertise, you can really get your hands dirty and hook straight to the API.

On the other hand, if you don’t need such a custom solution and time/effort is a concern, you can choose the built-in 2 step verification UI for iOS/Android/HTML — it’s a set-and-forget solution.

Putting Them Together

As the building block for messaging, Layer requires usage with a developer’s own identity manager. You build a service that replies back with a JWT token signed with your private key.

You can either build your own for this example or you can use RingCaptcha as your identity token provider.

Reach out to support@ringcaptcha.com and we’ll set your RingCaptcha API key to receive the signed token to use for Layer authentication.

See For Yourself

Take a look at the chat app iOS example, available on GitHub and fully open sourced.  Use it as a simple, quick start example.

Check out the sample code for easy integration of RingCaptcha 2-step verification UI for a non-authenticated user, authentication with Layer and display of ATLAS messaging UI.

Start by getting your RingCaptcha and Layer keys. Instructions can be found in the README.MD file.

Check out the Chat App for iOS here.  We can’t wait to see what you build with this!