Identosphere 151: Bhutan getting National SSID • Understanding Digital Public Infrastructure • Thoma Bravo: ForgeRock and Ping Merger
Weekly edition of the latest Self Sovereign Identity related news, development, upcoming events, and thoughtful commentary from the blog-o-sphere
Identosphere’s Weekly Highlights
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Upcoming
Digital Identity Hackathon: Introduction to Decentralized Identity 9/12
[VIRTUAL] GS1 Industry & Standards Event 2023 9/18-21
[Germany] Self Sovereign Identity at Eclipse: Why, What, and How? 10/17 Eclipse Con
[California, IIW] Internet Identity Workshop #37 10/10-12 ← Ticket Sales Open
[FIDO] Authenticate 2023 Conference 10/16-18
Explore the 15 leading Digital Identity Events of 2023 (updated) 2023-09-05 Truvity
[EU] DIGITAL HORIZONS 360 Sponsorship Invitation. Hospitality Technology Innovation 02/20-21 Spain
EU hospitality conf will feature SSI
invitation-only, non-sales event that will bring together 30–50 EU hospitality leaders for roundtable discussions on the technologies set to have the biggest industry impact in Europe
Hiring
Blockchain Decentralized Identity Developer Abaxx Technologies Toronto, ON
SOFTWARE ENGINEER (NODE.JS, TYPESCRIPT, AWS), DIGITAL CREDENTIALS CONSORTIUM (DCC) MIT Open Learning
Go Bhutan :)
Guess who’s getting the world’s first self-sovereign national digital ID? 2023-09-06 Rest of World
Druk Holding and Investments has been instrumental in setting up various other parallel projects, including the recently announced Bhutanverse — a metaverse that displays Bhutanese art, architecture, and motifs.
During the Parliament’s discussion on the digital ID bill, lawmakers received a total of 55 recommendations, with privacy among the major concerns.
Explainer
Navigating the Metaverse: Redefining Identity and Trust 2023-09-01 Tibor Mérey, BCG X
Different virtual reality worlds and traditional social platforms might not consistently support the same APIs or authentication methods. Furthermore, the user's identity and preferences need to persist across these varied environments.
The Importance of Interoperability in Digital Identity 2023-09-04 Lauren Hendrickson Identity.com
Interoperable decentralized identity is seen as the future of digital identity management. The goal is to ensure that various services, platforms, and organizations can access, share, and verify decentralized identity data. Interoperable decentralized identity empowers users to manage and share their identity attributes selectively. This allows individuals to control their digital footprint, enhance privacy, and build trust by only sharing relevant information.
Company
HPECid JUST raised >$350K from ~200 future forward thinking physicians! 2023-09-11 HPEC
Our solution will help us unplug from the systems that do not serve us, & coordinate care amongst each other, to build the ethical healthcare system of the future.
"Fluree: an Immutable, Verifiable, Shareable Database" 2023-05-11 Daniel Petranek
Fluree is a free and open source graph database written in Clojure and built to facilitate collaborative data-driven applications. It builds off of W3C open data standards like JSON-LD and RDF to create an immutable triple store that auditably tracks data changes over time.
.bit Rebrands to d.id 2023-09-08 PRNewswire
Formerly known as .bit, the leading Web3 identity protocol founded by ex-Tencent colleagues, today announces its rebranding to d.id. Accompanying this transition, the team has launched a brand new website and an upgraded product matrix. The transformation signifies the brand's amplified commitment to creating a robust Decentralized Identity (DID) ecosystem. Leveraging the potential of DID, the new d.id Team aims to empower community growth and reinforce digital identity building.
Organization
[Education/Training] Fortified ID: Decentralized Identity
Fortified ID's training provides your organization with knowledge in secure login, federation, identity management, decentralized identity and much more.
The Role of Organisational Identities - MEF, London 2023-08-18
There are a number of Organisation Identifiers available today (read more about the comparisons). Some are regional, some vertical, some closed to the public… but only one is truly global, standardised and trustworthy to be the one Organisation Identity on which we base all future identity services – and that is the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI).
Insights into Organisational Identity and vLEIs: Keith Uber on The Future of Identity Podcast 2023-08-21 Ubisecure
He also covers how Ubisecure’s RapidLEI service issues Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs), which have the potential to enhance business transactions, document signing, and verification processes
Organizational News
Velocity welcomes 6 new members to the Velocity for Startups program 2023-09-05 Velocity Network
We’re delighted to welcome to Aspire Ability, Good4work, Micro-credential Multiverse, Pruuvn, Territorium and Werkx, who are the first cohort of startups to join Velocity under the new system approved by the Board of Directors this Spring.
Literature
Towards FAIR Data in Distributed Machine Learning Systems Yongli Mou, Fengyang Guo, Wei Lu, Yongzhao Li, Oya Beyan, Thomas Rose, Schahram Dustdar, and Stefan Decker
In the era of big data and artificial intelligence, distributed machine learning has emerged as a promising solution to address privacy and security concerns while fostering collaboration between multiple parties. [....] Our work contributes to the development of an efficient, secure, and collaborative data ecosystem, fostering innovation in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Index Terms—FAIR data principles, distributed machine learning, federated learning
Privacy-Preserving Solutions for Blockchain: Review and Challenges 2019-10-19 JORGE BERNAL BERNABE, JOSE L. CANOVAS, JOSE L. HERNANDEZ-RAMOS, RAFAEL TORRES MORENO and ANTONIO SKARMETA
novel privacy-preserving solutions for blockchain based on crypto-privacy techniques are emerging to empower users with mechanisms to become anonymous and take control of their personal data during their digital transactions of any kind in the ledger, following a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) model. In this sense, this paper performs a systematic review of the current state of the art on privacy-preserving research solutions and mechanisms in blockchain, as well as the main associated privacy challenges in this promising and disrupting technology.
[Literature] Blockchain Privacy and Regulatory Compliance: Towards a Practical Equilibrium 2023-09-09
by Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum Foundation; Jacob Illum, Chainalysis; Matthias Nadler, University of Basel; Fabian Schär: Center for Innovative Finance, University of Basel, Ameen Soleimani: Privacy Pools
In this paper we study Privacy Pools, a novel smart contract-based privacy-enhancing protocol. We discuss the pros and cons of this protocol, and show how it could be employed to create a separating equilibrium between honest and dishonest users. The core idea of the proposal is to allow users to publish a zero-knowledge proof, demonstrating that their funds (do not) originate from known (un-)lawful sources, without publicly revealing their entire transaction graph. This is achieved by proving membership in custom association sets that satisfy certain properties, required by regulation or social consensus. The proposal may be a first step towards a future where people could prove regulatory compliance without having to reveal their entire transaction history.
Regional News
[Thailand] ETDA debuts new technology with the issuance of electronic medical certificates 2021-03-05 ETDA
Dr. Chaichana Mitrphan, Director of ETDA, said that this forum was organized to brainstorm new innovations in the form of Distributed Ledger Technology and concepts in data management. Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) using electronic documents in the form of Verifiable Credential (VC)in real business processes As well as jointly giving opinions in determining Business Flow and various details necessary for designing the project's work system.
EU Border evolving. The EU plans to digitise and monetise its borders. Here's how EuroNews
The European Union's plans to roll out a fee and automatic biometric scanning for non-EU travellers aim to secure the bloc's border but have raised concerns about surveillance and potential delays.
Understanding Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) thinking with the Chief Architect of the India Stack 2023-08-14 Kanwaljit Singh
India’s digital public infrastructure technologies such as Aadhaar, UPI, eSign, DigiLocker, Account Aggregator [...] are facilitating the lives of billions of people to get services [...] through digital interactions with public and private entities. In this fascinating interview, Chief Architect of all the technologies I listed above, Dr. Pramod Varma, explains “DPI thinking” that helped build the India Stack.
Policy
Digital Identity New Zealand advocates for a thoughtful approach to potential biometric regulation in New Zealand 2023-09-11 DINZ
Privacy Protection: DINZ believes that the Privacy Act 2020 can provide people with adequate privacy protections for biometrics if Privacy Impact Assessments become mandatory and high-quality, clear industry co-created guidance is issued under the oversight of OPC. This approach aims to avoid unintended consequences, elevate industry standards and prevent subpar practices
[UK DIA-TF] Digital ID: The benefits of an efficient orchestration service 2023-09-08 Todays Conveyancer
UK digital identity and attributes trust framework beta version (0.3) was published July this year [...]
Whether an organisation uses the Trust Framework on their own or as part of a scheme, they will need to perform at least one of the following roles:
An identity service provider;
An attribute service provider;
An orchestration service provider; or
Be a relying party.
Appeals Court Upholds Public.Resource.Org’s Right to Post Public Laws and Regulations Online 2023-09-12 EFF
On remand, the district court held that the non-commercial posting of standards incorporated by reference into law is fair use.
Standardization
Digital Credentials Protocols (DCP) Working Group OpenID Foundation
The goal of this WG is to develop OpenID specifications for the Issuer-Holder-Verifier-Model use-cases to enable issuance and presentations of the Digital Credentials of any format (IETF SD-JWTl, ISO/IEC 18013-5, etc.) and pseudonymous authentication from the End-User to the Verifier.
OAuth 2.0 Demonstrating Proof of Possession (DPoP) is now RFC 9449 2023-09-07 Mike Jones
The OAuth 2.0 Demonstrating Proof of Possession (DPoP) specification has been published as RFC 9449! As Vittorio Bertocci wrote, “One of the specs with the highest potential for (positive) impact in recent years.” I couldn’t agree more!
Adoption Time! And Lessons Learned… 2023-09-06 Mike Jones
Yesterday, the COSE “typ” (type) Header Parameter specification was adopted by the COSE working group. Today, the OAuth 2.0 Protected Resource Metadata specification was adopted by the OAuth working group.
Multiformats Considered Harmful 2023-09-05 Mike Jones
Multiformats institutionalize the failure to make a choice, which is the opposite of what good standards do. Good standards make choices about representations of data structures resulting in interoperability, since every conforming implementation uses the same representation.
Open Badges
5 platforms for issuing Open Badges 09-06 Doug Belshaw We Are Open Co-op
[Podcast] #1: The One with the Curious Advantage 2023-09-01 We are Open
In this post, we discuss tackling ‘change fatigue’ by conducting user research and narrowing down platform options, using ‘missions’ to engage the community, and aligning with a client through shared values.
[Podcast] #2: The One with the Reframing Recognition 2023-09-06
This is the fifth free, email-based course we’ve launched since 2020 so check out the others if you’re interested! We’ve got ones covering everything from running meetings well to what educators should learn about Feminism.
[Course] Reframing Recognition: strategies for success in going beyond microcredentials We are Open Co-op
Thoma Bravo: ForgeRock and Ping Merger
Thoma Bravo Makes 'Practical' Decision to Merge ForgeRock Into Ping Identity 2023-09-07 Dark Reading
Thoma Bravo has revealed plans to combine two identity and access management (IAM) providers – ForgeRock and Ping Identity – to create a company better positioned to compete with larger companies, such as Microsoft and Okta.
Let’s Hope It Works *This* Time 2023-09-05
Well, this is a big one for the identity industry. Two stalwarts becoming one.
>> Thoma Bravo Completes Acquisition of ForgeRock; Combines ForgeRock into Ping Identity
As someone who was there and in the thick of it during the last big merger of identity players, I wish all my (too many to tag) friends at ForgeRock and Ping Identity all the best, good luck, and a strong stomach.
Identity not SSI
No more queuing at the border: Finland tests digital passports in world first 2023-09-03 EuroNews - SSI Cousin: Digital Travel Credential
Factbox: Scrutiny of iris-scanning crypto project Worldcoin grows 2023-09-01 Reuters
It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy 2023-09-06 Mozilla Foundation
Lets think about it I don't want my software to kill people Ben Werdmuller
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