Identosphere 149: Google Joins Open Wallet Foundation • Transmute Completes DHS Red Team of Verifiable Data Platform • CA mDL Interop Test
You weekly guide to the latest news events and other info surrounding development and implementation of decentralized identity and verifiable credentials. Thanks for your continued support.
Identosphere’s Weekly Highlights
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Upcoming
[Zoom] Starters/Signroom/DIDroom - SSI and signature solutions 08/30-31 - Intro to W3C-DID ; PaDES/CaDES/XaDES signatures and Credential issuance W3C-VC/BBS/Coconut ; mobile wallet based
[London] Borderless Cyber 2023 2023/08/11-12 Oasis Open - 'Borderless Cyber Meets Privacy' is unique, focusing on the convergence of the cybersecurity and privacy disciplines and addressing new technologies, research, operationalization realities, risks, and solutions.
[London] #IdentityTrust2023 – Building Trust in Digital Identity 09/28 - structured to address the most crucial elements that will impact how organisations will adopt, digest and operate within the rapidly growing digital ID ecosystem. [Register]
Hiring
[Remote] Staff Developer Advocate at Block (Remote) ($172,200-$247,500)
[Madrid, Spain] Backend Software Engineer (SSI) SICPA
Organization News
[Deep Dive] Join us in Building a Truly “Open” Wallet Foundation 2023-08-23 OWF
Google joining OWF is a huge validation of our vision to bring together global industry and technology players to collaborate on critical open source projects highly aligned with European priorities, and the MOSIP upcoming contribution shows once again the unique power open source has to build on each others achievements
Interop
[California] Test of mDL interoperability organized by SpruceID, AAMVA 2023-08-22 Biometric Update
The American Association of Motor Vehicle Authorities (AAMVA) and members of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC17/WG10 are collaborating with SpruceID on the test. Australian government transport agency group Austroads has endorsed the event, according to the announcement. SpruceID is working with the California DMV to jointly test online identity verification with the state’s recently launched mDL.
Company News
[DHS] Transmute Successfully Completes U.S. Department of Homeland Security Red Team Testing of Verifiable Data Platform 2023-08-24 Transmute
We are grateful to DHS for helping to preemptively identify and address weak points in applying verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers to global supply chain security
[Good News?] Liquid Avatar Technologies Receives Offer to Sell Metaverse and Proof of Humanity Programs 2023-08-21 Liquid Avatar
a non-binding offer for its controlled subsidiary, Aftermath Islands Metaverse Limited (“Aftermath Islands”) and its Liquid Avatar Mobile App from a private Swiss based Metaverse and virtual experience organization [...] expected to provide Liquid Avatar Technologies with cash, primarily for debt reduction, and an expected significant amount of equity in the new parent company.
IDENTOS further strengthens public sector market with addition of Patricia Wiebe 2023-08-17 Identos
over twenty-five years of experience in identity management [...] Most recently, she was the Senior Director of Digital Identity for the Province of British Columbia, with past projects that include leading the development of the BC Services Card program and digital identity services.
[bookmarklet] Post-Mortem: Ceramic Discord Breach 2023-08-16 Ceramic
Hackers reached out to a core Ceramic team member on Telegram impersonating a prominent mainstream media journalist and requested an interview for a feature. Prior to speaking, they requested the completion of prerequisite consent forms that required the team member to drag and drop a button into their bookmarks and sign into Discord in order to verify their account identity.
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Empowering physicians through decentralization
Physicians must empower themselves now in order to be free to ethically care for patients. HPEC provides a decentralized, physician controlled system that automates and streamlines the credentialing experience.
[Healthcare] HPEC - Empowering Physicians to Practice Medicine on Their Terms
The HPEC wallet creates a portal of privacy and trust for our patients and our practice. Your credential wallet is the keepsake of your professional digital identity. It stores and authenticates original primary source information about your credentials, which is the way you will interact with patients in our future decentralized healthcare ecosystem.
Product
Indicio Holdr+
Available to download as a stand-alone digital wallet, Holdr+ can hold and share a variety of verifiable digital credentials and interoperate with multiple Trusted Digital Ecosystems. Release Notes
Built from Hyperledger Aries Bifold open source code
Interoperable with other Aries-compatible solutions
Communicates using advanced DID:Comm messagin
Breakthrough in DIDComm Mediation: Indicio Achieves Significant Scale with New Solution 2023-08-15 Indicio
The first thing we had to know were baseline numbers: using mediation, how many credentials could ACA-Py sustainably issue to new users in a minute? What about existing users? How about verification?
Development
What does Presentation Exchange do and what parts of it do we actually need? 2023-08-25 Mike Jones
I organized unconference sessions on Wednesday and Thursday at the 2023 OAuth Security Workshop on “What does Presentation Exchange do and what parts of it do we actually need?” [Slides]
[Auth0] Strengthen Your Application Security beyond Authentication 2023-08-15 Auth0
We wanted a way for developers and business decision makers to easily leverage the benefits of ID.me’s trusted and portable credentials within their existing Auth0 implementation in a turnkey manner [...]
Introducing a New Flexible Way of Bringing Identities from Any Source into Microsoft Entra ID! Microsoft 2023-08-23
Why a Ledger? 2023-08-22 Indicio
2) Tamper resistance: A distributed ledger makes it very difficult for a malicious actor to break in and change material.
3) High availability: If one node on the network goes down for any reason, there are plenty of others to receive data from.
4) Geopolitical and infrastructure diversity: By hosting the ledger on servers located in multiple geographic areas and by diverse organizations, network resilience to technical problems is maximized — and this contributes to high availability.
Interview with interested.fyi Team: Implementing Veramo in Buildathon at EthDenver 2023 2023-08-26 Veramo
The Veramo tools existing independently of any other technology is what makes it appealing. [...] By only focusing on the DID/VC layer and allowing us to implement our own storage, we were able to ideate and test implementations more efficiently.
Business
'Content is a crucial aspect of your online presence as it essentially represents your brand,' says Michael Cichon 2023-06-15 InfoSec Report
The grandfather of them all – white papers – are essentially a narrative that contain supporting ideas typically found in its chapters. These chapters represent significant concepts, and you can also find them promoted independently in different forms. Let me provide a specific example [...] this white paper focuses on technology-enabled business transformation, so it addresses the many challenges in controlling an enterprise-wide project
Identity management named key challenge among CISOs 2023-08-24 SC Magazine
IAM investments were prioritized by 85% of CISOs and information technology leaders while almost 25% said they mainly focused on user and device identity management, according to a Cisco report.
Research
Survey on Digital Sovereignty and Identity: From Digitization to Digitalization 2023-08-26 Kheng Leong Tan, Chi-hung Chi, Kwok-yan Lam; Digital Trust Centre, Nanyang Technological University
The review covers existing SSI solutions and points out that an efficient key management system, the scalability and interoperability of the solution, and a well-established standard are some of the challenges for SSI deployment. Finally, the paper concludes with open issues about digital identity, including dynamic attributes, persona, and attribute ownership, that challenge the current reference architecture of SSI as well as its implementation.
Government
[Louisiana] Louisiana’s Digital Driver’s License and Act 440 — One step forward and two steps back Mark Wheeler
The dDL is available from the LA Wallet app for iOS or Android on mobile devices. A Louisiana resident must possess an existing, physical driver’s license to create the digital one. The LA Wallet’s account is set up via an email and password to sync the dDL to the printed plastic card DL.
[National ID] Exploring the Nexus Between Technologies and Human Rights Opportunities and Challenges in Southeast Asia 2019-12-24 Jun Etan
Empirical observation of the digital rights movement in Southeast Asia reveals that most work has been done on conventional rights translated to digital spaces. The lack of technical capacity is a major gap in addressing digital rights violations that require a deeper understanding of how the technology functions.
Decentralized Web
[New Social, UX] Publishers on social media are between a rock and a hard place Werd
Comparitive analysis: Mastadon, Threads, Bluesky, T2, Reddit, Twitter\X, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube… Newsletters and RSS
The Peer Computing Architecture 2023-08-16 reb00ted
I used that term frequently […] I believe it’s time to dig it back out, because […] there’s real uptake in this computing architecture with protocols such as ActivityPub and Matrix. My definition is at peercomputing.org.
Explainer
About Digital Credentials 2023-08-17 Finbold - cryptographically verified digital attestation, evidence, or proof of qualification, competence, or authority issued to an entity
How to Manage Cybersecurity Threats, Not Episodes 2023-08-21 Gartner
[Video, EUDI] Insights into Organisational Identity and vLEIs: Keith Uber on The Future of Identity Podcast 2023-08-21 Ubisecure
[podcast] Unraveling the Future of Self-Sovereign Identity with Marie Wallace from Accenture 2023-08-13 Actionable Futurist
Marie debunked the common myth that implementing [SSI] necessitates a blockchain [...] We also looked at Marie’s instrumental role in projects like IBM’s Digital Health Pass and New York’s Excelsior Pass
[DID:WEB, DID:ION] #Microsoft Entra Verified ID - Part 1: Decentralized Identity (DID) 2023-08-14 Kim Weiland
[Microsoft, Linkedin] Unlocking Trust: How Microsoft Revolutionizes LinkedIn with Verifiable Credentials 2023-08-16 Ayanworks
Microsoft’s recent introduction of a new system for LinkedIn members marks a significant step towards strengthening workplace verification. By leveraging Microsoft Entra Verified ID,
A call to decentralize social identities — to curtail social media privacy abuses 2023-08-15 Security Boulevard
The time has come to reject the status quo and push for a future where privacy is considered a right and not a privilege. Every social media user’s agenda should be a revolution to hold tech giants accountable for their actions.
Beware what you wish for! MyDex 2023-08-27
Ten years ago, if you had said ‘Individuals should have control over their data’, it might have seemed controversial. Nowadays it’s commonly accepted. But as one door opens, another door closes. We need to be aware [...]
If people want to control the data that organisations have about them, they need to understand what this data is and what it is being used for. They also need to understand how to exert control via each different organisation’s own systems.
The real value of passwordless authentication 2023-08-24 Okta
In short, in the varied history and technology of authentication, passwords are arguably the weakest option. But will getting rid of passwords solve everything wrong with modern auth? Not quite; alternative approaches have their own limitations to consider.
Identity not SSI
Securing north/south and east/west traffic @ DevRev 2023-08-16 Facile Login
Zero Trust 2023-08-14 Phil Windley
[india] Modi Government Collects Gig Workers’ Biometrics for Welfare Program Find Biometrics
MLB to launch new, voluntary facial recognition ticket entry system at Phillies games NBC Sports Philadelphia - “Go-Ahead Entry” will be available at Citizens Bank Park starting Monday.
ProjectVRM 2.0 2023-08-18 Doc Searls
Three questions to ask about synthetic identities SCMagazine
Previously simple data leaks for email addresses, names and birthdates, phone numbers, and even something as obfuscated as the last four digits of a Social Security number are being linked, merged, and correlated with other data breaches to produce partial profiles for millions of people
AI and ID
AI and Identity: Taking Stock of Identity Solutions in the Age of AI 2023-08-17 Ping
The immovable opacity of AI meets the irresistible force of privacy 2023-08-17 Lockstep
Beyond the AI Noise: Authenticity & Provenance in the Digital Sphere 2023-08-17 Carsten Stöcker
From the darkroom to generative AI 2023-08-15 Content Authenticity Initiative
A world-renowned expert in the field of misinformation, disinformation, and digital forensics as well as an advisor to the CAI, Professor Farid explores the limits of these techniques and their part in a larger ecosystem needed to regain trust in the visual record. Read the first article in this six-part series.
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