Identosphere #25 • DHS SVIP Interop Plugfest • ION launched on Bitcoin Mainnet • SIOP with Kristina Yasuda
Breaking news, upcoming events, infographics, podcasts, blog-posts, videos, and thought-leadership all curated from the last week
Welcome (back!) to Identosphere
Identosphere Quarterly
As a thanks to our patrons, we’ve compiled a list of the top news and information that passed through this newsletter since its began, to create the 1st Identosphere Quarterly. It will be available to all of our Patrons, this week, and probably land on our blog next year.
This new release of Identosphere helps give shape to the quarter, and helps ensure vital resources don’t escape our notice.
Coming Up
Meetup with Indicio to explore decentralized identity
As a public benefit corporation, Indicio is committed to advancing decentralized identity as a technology that will benefit everyone. To help people understand how this technology works, we are hosting Meetups once per month on a Wednesday, except holidays.
GS1 US Innovation Summit • March 30
opportunity for innovators, entrepreneurs, and supply chain thought leaders to jumpstart strategies and actions that drive the future of trusted data sharing.
Lifelong Learner Project, Powered by Teachers • March 31
One of the winners of the ACE Blockchain Innovation Challenge, The Lifelong Learner Project is excited to share its vision and demonstrate our success with providing teacher professional credentials in a digital wallet with the larger education community.
PoCATHON by Affiniti • Mar 26 – May 9, 2021
We invite developers across the world to come and build applications that generate secure, portable and privacy-preserving credentials enabling trust across entities using Affinidi’s APIs
Oktane21 • April 5-9
Inspiring keynotes. Hands-on training with experts. Oktane21 is the place to learn new skills, gain an Okta certification, engage with new ideas, and emerge ready to create the next transformative experiences.
Covid-19 Technology Innovations • April 14
“explore the technology innovations being pioneered in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and what potential for Scottish ventures this presents.” by Peter Ferry, Gary McKay and Julian Ranger (Siccar, APPII and digi.me)
Internet Identity Workshop XXXII (#32) • April 20-22
OpenID Foundation Virtual Workshop • April 29, 2021
Identiverse 2021 • June 21-23 (Denver)
News
ION – We Have Liftoff!
We are excited to share that v1 of ION is complete and has been launched on Bitcoin mainnet. We have deployed an ION node to our production infrastructure and are working together with other companies and organizations to do so as well. ION does not rely on centralized entities, trusted validators, or special protocol tokens – ION answers to no one but you, the community. Because ION is an open, permissionless system, anyone can run an ION node, in fact the more nodes in operation, the stronger the network becomes. Development of ION, and the Sidetree standard ION is based on, takes place in the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF). Read on to learn how you can integrate ION, DIDs, and Verifiable Credentials in your applications and services.
Identity, Unlocked... SIOP with Kristina Yasuda
As a discovery mechanism to invoke a Self-Issued OP, the discussion on the podcast covered the usage of a custom schema 'openid://'. Alternative mechanisms to address the limitations of custom schemas are being actively explored in the WG.
The conversation meanders through deeper details, from how the current SIOP specification draft under the OpenID Foundation picks up the mission from a former attempt under DIF to encoding approaches for verifiable presentations (embedding in JWTs, LD proofs), how to represent attributes
Why we’re launching MATTR VII
Inspired by the seven states of matter, our platform gives builders and developers all the tools they need at their fingertips to create a whole new universe of decentralized products and applications. We provide all the raw technical building blocks to allow you to create exactly what you have in mind. MATTR VII is composable and configurable to fit your needs, whether you’re a well-established business with legacy systems or a start-up looking to build the next best thing in digital privacy. Best of all, MATTR VII is use-case-agnostic, meaning we’ve baked minimal dependencies into our products so you can use them the way that makes the most sense for you.
IPR - what is it? why does it matter?
There is a lot of diversity in the category of future patent problems. Someone who was contributing without declaring that they hold a patent related to the work can claim they had a patent later (years after the specification is finished) and seek payment from everyone using/implementing the standard, claiming licensing rights or even lost revenue on ideas they legally own.
Indicio contributes UI messaging design for digital wallet to open source
A finalist in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology ( S&T) Trusted User Interface (UI) Digital Wallets Challenge, the UI digital wallet design is now available in the Indicio public Github repository.
Meeco expands UX and Design team along with a new office in Adelaide
Meeco now has illustrious neighbours such as the Australian Space Agency, the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, the Aboriginal Art and Cultures Centre and coming soon, Amazon and MIT.
TDW Decentralized Glossary Management and Collaboration Platform (TDW Glossary): Digital Identity Neighborhood
PSA Today #36: Kaliya and Seth talk about Privacy, Anonymity, Pseudonymity & NFTs
how do issues of identity and anonymity play out in the world of creating and collecting digital art and collectibles on the blockchain.
Paper
Digital identities – steps on the path to an ID ecosystem BankenVerband Position Paper
To be a success, an ecosystem of verified digital identities must
be usable by different companies and across different sectors,
enable interoperability with existing schemes,
be based on consistent and, ideally, globally recognised standards,
be usable by any individual in society, irrespective of nationality,
be secure and help to protect consumers against identity fraud,
be consumer-centric, meaning that it enables data sovereignty,
be usable in legal contexts and be recognised by all public authorities,
and be able to accommodate natural persons and legal entities and, in future, objects too.
MyData
Misconceptions that Kill Progress in Personal Data
It is not possible to make good policy decisions about priorities for investments, grants, innovation and research projects or rules and regulations if the grounds for these decisions are faulty. Currently, effective policy making is hampered by widespread misunderstandings about where the biggest economic opportunities lie, the nature of issues such as control, and the role of citizens in the workings of the data economy.
Verifiable Credentials
What are Verifiable Credentials?
At the most basic level, verifiable credentials, or VC in short, are tamper-proof credentials that can be verified cryptographically.
Why the Verifiable Credentials Community Should Converge on BBS+
BBS+ LD-Proofs use JSON-LD schemas, so credentials that use them can have a rich, hierarchical set of attributes. Instead of the heavy-handed mechanism for the encoding and canonicalization of attributes values that we’d imagined for Rich Schemas, they use RDF canonicalization and a hash function. Rather than expanding the credential definition, they discarded it, taking advantage of some properties of BBS+ keys which allow for deterministic expansion.
Verifiable Credentials: Mapping to a Generic Policy Terminology
Why is this useful? When writing policy, you need a succinct model which is clear enough for subsequent interpretation. To do this, you need conceptual buckets to drop things into. Yes, this model is likely to change, but it’s my best and latest crack at it to synthesize the complex world of digital credentials with an abstraction that might be useful to help us align existing solutions while adopting exciting new capabilities.
Interop
This presentation on the DHS/SVIP Interop Plug-Fest is epic!
DHS/SVIP Interoperability Plug-Fest 2 // VC/DID/Blockchain Multi-Platform & Multi-Vendor Interoperability Showcase Anil John
(Slides) Through the presentations and demos, we hope that you are able to gain an appreciation of the engineering depth, openness, inclusiveness and the multi-vendor, multi-platform interoperability that we demonstrated that is needed for these type of solutions to internet scale without locking anyone into a particular vendor or technology stack.
Interoperability is Not a Choice Transmute
Interoperability moves from theory to reality when companies have meaningful ability to choose. It is predicated on open standards foundations that enable easy movement of data and vendors.
Our team was proud to participate in the US Department of Homeland Security Silicon Valley Innovation Program Interoperability Plug-fest this month. DHS SVIP has been leading the charge on interoperability for years now, putting their funding and networks on the table to lead the charge.
Transmute: Interoperability & Selective Disclosure in an Audit Authorization Scenario (2:07)
Proof of COVID Vaccination Credential
Transmute + DHS SVIP: Showing Interoperability in a Supply Chain Scenario (3:22)
DHS SVIP PlugFest 2021 – Interop Testing Demo Mattr
As part of our deliverables for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Silicon Valley Innovation Program, we developed capabilities including a MATTR web wallet, CHAPI credential interactions, and direct interoperability with issuance and verification infrastructure built by other vendors. The results of this work are documented in our publicly available open-source test suite: https://w3c-ccg.github.io/vc-http-api/test-suite/mattr/
DHS SVIP PlugFest 2021 – USCIS Appointment Demo Mattr
We showcase our Mobile Wallet and OIDC Bridge Platform Extension in action, demonstrating how BBS+ signatures and selective disclosure can allow users to manage which data they are sharing with relying parties in a privacy-preserving way. This work leverages a newly created Appointment vocabulary for JSON-LD
DHS SVIP PlugFest 2021 – Paper & Digital Vaccination Credentials Mattr
We showcase how both paper and digital credentials can be verified using the same infrastructure, allowing for easier relying-party integration. This work leverages CBOR-LD and a newly created Vaccination Certificate vocabulary
Three-Vendor Interop - DHS SVIP Showcase Day Danube Tech
Full Walkthrough DHS SVIP Showcase Danube Tech
Virtual Credentials Journey 2 Danube Tech
Virtual Credentials Journey 3 Danube Tech
Interoperability Fest – Oil & Gas Mavenet
Sphereon wins an EU eSSIF-Lab grant
We’re very pleased to announce that our proposal “Presentation Exchange – Credential Query Infra” has been selected as 1 of 7 out of 299 proposals to join the second Infrastructure-oriented program of the EU’s eSSIF-Lab.
We’ll be providing a Presentation Exchange that creates interoperability between W3C DIF-compliant Verifiable Credentials and Hyperledger Aries-based Verifiable Credentials for the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI).
What’s a Hub?
Selected Parts of the DIF SDS/CS Hub and EDV Discussion featuring Daniel Buchner’s Description of a Hub Michael Herman
This is a transcription of selected parts of the EDV-Hub conversation during the DIF SDS/CS Thursday weekly Zoom call on March 11, 2021. This is the call where Daniel Buchner described (verbally) several aspects about what is and what is not a Hub.
Confidential Storage
PROPOSAL: Confidential Storage Specification Refactoring 0.2 – March 24, 2021
Based on the March 11 Zoom discussion where we worked hard to discern the differences between Agents, Hubs, and EDVs (and I believe were largely successful IMO), I’ve like to propose to the SDS/CS WG that we refactor the current Confidential Storage specification into 3 separable parts/specifications.
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