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Upcoming

• The Future use of SSI and verifiable credentials 11/30

• eSSIF-Lab final event 12/1 Brussels (Kaliya will be there)

• FIDO Alliance Announces Authenticate Virtual Summit focused on Securing IoT 12/7

• Thoughtful Biometrics Workshop 2/13-17 [Registration]

• Save the Date: APAC Digital Identity unConference, March 1-3 Bangkok, Thailand

• IIW 36 April 18-20, Mountain View

• Safe the Date: Digital Identity unConference Europe #DICE. June 7-9, Zurich, Switzerland

Hiring

Open position: Researcher Apply by 12/5 MyData

with a background in governance, human-centric infrastructures, and data ecosystems. 

Explainer

• [video] What is Decentralized Identity? Why is it important to users & businesses alike? Fractal

• Electronic identification made easy thanks to self-sovereign identity The Paypers

• Verifiable Credentials Explained Zaisan

Has SSI’s Identity Problem been Solved? Trinsic

SSI, Web5, IDtech, Reusable Identity, Authentic Data — Which Should You Use?

• “Reusable” and “self-sovereign” are ideologies, ideals, or ambitions identity developers can ascribe to, just like directors can aspire to produce artistic vs entertaining films.

• Web2, web3, and web5, as paradigms or architectures, are akin to the style used to shoot, which is determined in part by the types of cameras, lenses, and other technologies used.

• Categorical terms such as IDtech, fintech, medtech, etc. are like genres of movies (e.g. superhero, horror, romance+comedy, etc).

Internet Identity Workshop Highlights

“Once you figure out identity, banking is just accounting” h/t Tommy McThomuel

IIWXXXV is a wrap! The largest @idworkshop to date Heidi Nobantu Saul

~ 160 Sessions called and Convened See you in April 2023

making history for SSI/DID and beyond Robert Mao

Summary of Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) Curity

verifiable credentials movement has gone from a dream of a better Internet to practical discussions and proofs of concepts. This is something that we are working passionately on, so it was great to join other like minded people working to digitize bits of identity information into digital wallets.

Identity Insights - IIW Recap Day 1 Indicio [Day 2] [Day 3]

In this special edition of Identity Insights we talk with Mike Ebert, Enterprise Software Team Lead at Indicio, about his experiences during the first day of IIW, including what the event is all about, what new ideas are being introduced, and the most interesting sessions of the day.

Standards Work

[github] OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance - Client library Sphereon

OpenID4VCI defines an API designated as Credential Endpoint that is used to issue verifiable credentials and corresponding OAuth 2.0 based authorization mechanisms (see [RFC6749]) that a Wallet uses to obtain authorization to receive verifiable credentials [...] allows new applications built using Verifiable Credentials to utilize OAuth 2.0 as integration and interoperability layer.

[iiw] “DID Method Battle Royale” by Nick Reynolds from @ConsenSys / @veramolabs Ankur Banerjee 

we discussed other characteristic beyond the DID Method Rubric for scoring IIW35_Day 2_Session 8_Space D

So why now and why client discovery? Tobias Looker 

I believe we need a simple and common approach documented for the OAuth2 community that enables a wide range of use cases and many of the proposals to date have been more focused on specific applications such as federation or social login. mattrglobal / draft-looker-oauth-client-discovery

[Tweet] For all the people who attended the “standards regrets” session at #iiw @idworkshop Vittorio

the book that presents OpenId 2 as a case study of design failure is [Why We Fail: Learning from Experience Design Failures Paperback Victor Lombard]

Research Literature

Privacy Preserving and Scalable Revocation Method for Self Sovereign Identity -- The Perfect Revocation Method does not exist yet Andreas Freitag

Revocation can be done with different methods e.g. lists, compressed lists and cryptographic accumulators. A revocation method must be privacy preserving and must scale. This paper gives an overview about the available revocation methods, include a survey to define requirements, assess different revocation groups against the requirements, highlights shortcomings of the methods and introduce a new revocation method called Linked Validity Verifiable Credentials

Real World Use

Verifiable Credentials to streamline the events and ticketing industry Cheqd

The use of Verifiable Credentials (VC) – a tamper-evident data file with a set of claims about a person, organisation, or thing that can be cryptographically verified – is poised to streamline the entire events industry. Using VCs, however, it would be far more difficult for bots and scalpers to get the requisite level of trust necessary to bulk-buy and resell tickets, while event-goers will be able to prove trusted attributes

Education

Gordian Envelope Use Case: Educational Credentials BlockchainCommons

Gordian Envelopes are useful for credentials in large part because of their ability to support advanced features such as elision, peer-based attestation, and herd privacy. They go far beyond just presenting validatable credentials to allowing the individual holders to decide what gets credentialed, what gets shown, how, and in what context. They thus add self-sovereign control to the standard rubric of Verifiable Credentials

Building a High Performance Scottish Skills and Jobs Ecosystem DigitalScot

The goal of the Action Plan is to scale this approach nationally, developing a single micro-credentials framework that is shared across Scotland’s skills and employment organizations

Micro-Credentials : Building Blocks for 21st Century Digital Education DigitalScot

This strategy offers Scotland multiple levels of accelerating economic benefit, most notably:

• An improved approach for explicitly linking the skills requirements of employers to available skills programs and academic courses.

• Advancing a common digital economy infrastructure that will service multiple use cases including this one.

Gaming

Video Gamers, Say Hello to Digital Identity DIACC

With an industry that generates such significant global revenue, it’s bound to attract the attention of cyberattackers looking to steal company and gamer data for malicious use.

Carv raises $4M to build Web3 decentralized identity for gaming Silicon Angle

attempting to onboard traditional gaming users into Web3 is difficult because getting them used to cryptocurrency wallets and understanding private keys and memorizing long strings of numbers is difficult. Using decentralized identity gives them a unique ID that follows them from application to application that’s easier to maintain. 

Organization

New group working to #endsurveillancecapitalism Stop tracking us, stop manipulating us, and stop working with companies that do Chris Heuer

We are thankful for Keep Badges Weird WeareopenCoop

In this first year of Keep Badges Weird we wrote lots of reflections, promising practices, invitations and other posts.

SICPA DIGITAL IDENTITY SICPA

Starting from birth registration, all the way to death certification, daily living in our communities revolves around foundational physical identity documents that enable access to education, health and social benefits, education, finance and commerce over a lifetime.

Yet millions of people are excluded from these services due to the lack of formal ID. Can governments offer a digital identity designed for people?

8 Organizations Driving Self-Sovereign Identity Forward Truvity

While there are many organizations working to make self-sovereign identity a reality, this is just a handful of the groups that are helping drive forward progress. 

Humanitarian

Traverse: Insights from Australian Red Cross creating, designing and ending a digital identity platform Solferino Academy

There is a long-standing challenge within the humanitarian sector – the slow process of onboarding and managing staff and volunteers for rapid deployment during a crisis.

Economics of Personal Data

The Great Data Delusion MyData

This is the first of a series of blogs exploring the Surprising Economics of Personal Data, the subject of Mydex CIC’s latest White Paper.

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT The Surprising Economics of Personal Data MyDex

what few people have realised (yet) is that new citizen-empowering ways of collecting, storing, sharing and using personal data have the potential to transform the workings of our economy, cutting the costs of service provision by 30%, 50% or more (depending on circumstances), while improving service quality and opening up new vistas of innovation.

DWeb

BlueSky - Authenticated Transfer Protocol

First impressions of Bluesky's AT Protocol Educated Guesswork

ATP allows you to have a persistent identity that is portable between PDSes. It does so by introducing the computer scientist's favorite tool, another layer of indirection. The basic idea is that your identity is used to look up which PDS your data is actually stored on; that way you can move from PDS to PDS without changing your identity.

[video] Gabe Cohen, TBD Web5, at ToIP Ecosystem Foundry Working Group TOIP

TBD team at Block announced Web5: an extra decentralized web platform. It is being built upon Decentralized Identifiers, Decentralized Web Nodes, Verifiable Credentials and many other SSI primitives. On Oct 27, 2022 Gabe Cohen presented on how they think about Web5, what they are building, how it is becoming a reality, and how you can help.

Tim Ruff at #iiw compared #web5 use cases vs going to market Lance Byrd

Seek a 'Queen Bee' decision maker. Remember the future tipping point. Talk to customers! Customers define the solution fit. Are you selling optimization/relief/enhancement? Narrow the market. Political solutions needed

Mastadon

Defederation and governance processes Doug Belshaw

Ukuvota, an approach which uses score voting to help with decision making:

To “keep things the way they are” is always an option, never the default. Framing this option as a default position introduces a significant conservative bias — listing it as an option removes this bias and keeps a collective evolutionary.

To “look for other options” is always an option. If none of the other current options are good enough, people are able to choose to look for better ones — this ensures that there is always an acceptable option for everyone.

Metaverse

Neal Stephenson on The Future of the Metaverse a16z Podcast

When Neal Stephenson coined “the metaverse” three decades ago, his book Snow Crash was found on the shelves of “science fiction”. While the book remains in that category, many of its concepts are now found in reality… Fast forward to 2022, where numerous companies are now building toward their version of the metaverse, including Neal himself

From “Dynamite to Metaverse,” Global Community Discusses Crypto’s Role in Terror Financing Shyft Network

The Annual ‘No Money for Terror Conference” was held in New Delhi, India, on the 18th and 19th of November, 2022.

Companies

Ethereum Attestation Service @eas_eth · Nov 27

Both Spruce and Trinsic replied they are rooting for everyone. 

What digital identity, DID, or verifiable credential projects are you rooting for going into 2023? Add/ remove from this list: @gitcoin passport, @Sismo_eth, @gitpoap, @proofofhumanity, @discoxyz, @layer3xyz, @SpruceID, @BrightIDProject, @0xPolygonID, @ceramicnetwork

[video] IIW 35 Extended Demo Veramo 

Today we’re going to show you 3 different ways to get started with Veramo. No matter what your platform or use case.

This video is an extended version (showing full setup required, to serve as a developer resource) of the demo to be given by the Veramo team at IIW 35.

Development

@TelegramSam at #iiw talked about Standard Wallet Backup Containers Lance Byrd

so that even Muggles can backup and restore their digital wallet across vendors and using standard tools like tar/gzip/argon2. Let's make this happen!

Standard Wallet Backup Container Sam Curren at IIW Fall 2022 Notes by Lance Byrd

• Problem: Wallet backups are custom to the wallet and lock your identity into a vendor

• Goal: Backup/Restore across wallet vendors using common tech

• Note: JFF wallet plugfest might focus on testing interop of wallet backup/restore

[tweet] Devil's Dictionary of Linguistic Dark Patterns #iiw Nat Sakimura

Go to website: Run our code on your computer
Sign-in / log-in: Allow us to track you across sessions and create your behavioral profile 
Privacy agreement: How are we going to sell your data
Decentralized: We run our code on your machine at your own risk
Self-sovereign: Yours to use and yours to lose

Public Sector

DCMS guest blog – building trust in digital identities UKAS

UK Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework [...] places rigorous fraud management, privacy, cyber security and inclusion requirements on organisations, based on robust international standards. It’s been developed in conjunction with the National Cyber Security Centre, as well as other expert stakeholders such as the ICO.

Apple Spying on its Customers

Apple Hit With Class Action Over Tracking of Mobile App Activity Bloomberg Law

“Through its pervasive and unlawful data tracking and collection business, Apple knows even the most intimate and potentially embarrassing aspects of the user’s app usage—regardless of whether the user accepts Apple’s illusory offer to keep such activities private,” the lawsuit said.

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