Identosphere #41 • Smart Property • Privacy War @ W3C • Verifiable Open Badges
We curate the latest news and updates in decentralized identity, with upcoming events, standards talk, use-cases and business strategy.
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Coming Up this WEEK!
1/2 Day IIW Virtual Event
•
User-Experience
• 6/22
A European Framework for Decentralized Digital Identity Wallets • 7/15
IIW 33 • 10/12-14
Big Picture
Identity gets a new look: examining the W3C Verifiable Credentials standard Information Age
David Chadwick, product director at Crossword Cybersecurity, discusses what the W3C Verifiable Credentials standard
Bosch: Digital identity – enabling secure collaboration with blockchain technology
anyone could issue an identity, access authorization or even a certificate to anyone. For example, “I might give my neighbor a permit to access my garage or certify that he can use my car,” Nik says. The neighbor would then store this evidence in his e-wallet.
Affinidi Role of Public Key Cryptography in Self-Sovereign Identity
Indicio: The decentralized identity revolution is powered by machine-readable governance
we have a way to enable clear, flexible, governance right now through Agents and machine-readable governance. Agents are the software that allow data to be shared and authenticated by consent between parties, and this makes them the most important governance entities in decentralized identity.
How to Gain Control Over Our Digital Selves NGI Community
Digital identity must switch from a common silos to a set of containers; where identity transforms into** identifiers that are no longer centralised and linked to one another. And over which the citizen can always be not only the controller, but the ruler**.
Podcasts Looking Ahead
Two Insiders Look at the Future of the Identity Industry Ping Identity
The days of centralized control are fading.
"Whatever we have going forward can’t be centralized. It has to be distributed and out where it's being used."
The Future of Stuff Podcast: Ep.1 What is Smart Property? with Vinay Gupta
some widely different use cases (wedding planning?), the relationship with the sharing economy, the distribution of power in such a system, some privacy and security concerns, and the prospect of programming social interaction and value flows around goods and services.
Frontier Talk #4 | Doc Searls - Building the Future of Identity
the two disciplines that matter really are the are the individual and the company how do we work for the for both of those at the same time
Company Updates
Evernym July 2021 Release Notes
The organization of the Verity code repository is undergoing significant changes, as we are moving to a multi-node Kubernetes deployment using Helm charts and Terraform. This will make it easier for us to scale and manage Verity, reducing downtime during maintenance and upgrades. But it will also make it easier for interested developers to run the Verity code outside of AWS.
Spherity leads the GAIA-X Identity and Trust group to accelerate the Energy Transition in Europe
GAIA-X is creating a proposal for the next generation of a European data infrastructure: a secure, federated system that meets the highest standards of digital sovereignty while promoting innovation.
Indicio.Tech Node Operator Program
Join a group of innovative companies building the future of decentralized identity.
Learn what it takes to run a decentralized network. Learning is doing.
Approved Node Operators are eligible to receive one year of complimentary business level service support while running your node with full best practice checks, your own private Slack channel for Q&A, specialized guidance based on your individual needs, and other exclusive business level support benefits.
Litentry & Friends Episode 3: Litentry & Integritee
the idea is that linen tree will build a T side chain so-called a trusted executive environment sidechain using integrity's framework to store identity linking information in a privacy preserving and secure manner
Microsoft Identity
Issue and accept verifiable credentials using Azure Active Directory | Azure Friday
Sydney Morton joins Scott Hanselman to show how verifiable credentials enable you to own and prove who you are in the digital world.
Microsoft Is Using Bitcoin to Help Build a Decentralized Internet Reason
Daniel Buchner, a self-described libertarian, is the project lead for ION. Reason sat down with him at the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami to talk about how this technology could usher in a new era of hyper-individualized online identity and privacy.
Standards Work
The Future of Open Badges is Verifiable Kerri Lemoie
When Open Badges was kicking off ten years ago, it was conceived to be a recognition infrastructure for skills attained and achievements accomplished anywhere at any time. Badges could assert skills learned informally, formally, really in any aspect of and through life.
Someone Tweeted a pointer to this - the Design Goals of DID in the W3C Spec.
Decentralized Identifiers are a component of larger systems, such as the Verifiable Credentials ecosystem [VC-DATA-MODEL], which influenced the design goals for this specification. The design goals for Decentralized Identifiers are summarized here.
The Privacy War inside the W3C Protocol.com
new entrants from the ad-tech industry and elsewhere aren't just trying to derail standards that could hurt their businesses; they're proposing new ones that could actually enshrine tracking under the guise of privacy. "Fortunately in a forum like the W3C, folks are smart enough to get the distinction," Soltani said. "Unfortunately, policymakers won't."
Public Sector
The future of digital identity in Australia
We now have a rare opportunity to break through the challenges of fidelity and provenance that plague cyberspace and, with a gentle course correction, deal with a bigger and yet more manageable problem than digital identity, namely the quality and reliability of data itself.
Towards a universal, self-sovereign and privacy preserving digital identity for the public sector
The EU-funded IMPULSE focuses on building a decentralised Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) model by combining two of the most promising technologies available today, such as Artificial Intelligence and blockchain networks, with the aim of facing the limitation of the existing electronic identification systems in the public sector..
RaonSecure & RaonWhiteHat to continue paving the way for widening adoption of Decentralized Identity-based services
The DID-based technology developed by RaonSecure and RaonWhiteHat has already been deployed in public institutions. For example, the technology is currently being leveraged in the authentication process of the MMA’s online service that has been opened since January 2020. In this regard, a total of 283,000 DIDs has been issued as of May 2021 and the DID-based simple authentication service has been used over 2.25 million times. The efficiency of the service has allowed the corresponding public institutions to drastically reduce the cost of its authentication process.
SSI In Africa
#180 The Blockchain Potential in Somalia: Education + Adoption-Blockchain in Africa
”I think the verification of identity is the biggest win and the lowest hanging fruit." Abbas Gassem
Using Decentralized Digital IDs and Blockchain to Help Millions in Africa Get Identified
We have a Layer 2 network built on top of the Algorand blockchain called the Flex Network (FN). Every issuing authority and verifier organization will be required to either run or use a SaaS API, to interact with a FN node. The node acts as a trustless way to create, update, and fetch information about digital identifiers (DIDs) from the blockchain. This enables verifiable credentials to be independently issued and verified against the public keys associated with the issuer and holder DIDs.
Healthcare
Blockchain, Interoperability, and Self-Sovereign Identity: Trust Me, It’s My Data
This lack of management is critical as studies have shown that “patients only visited their primary care physicians 54.6% of the time when seeking care. Where do they go for that other 45.4%? Patients receive care from other organizations where that provider may not have access to the patient’s medical records.”
COVID-19
Covid health passes revived for bigger role in keeping economies open DigiMe
Venues such as restaurants, bars and pubs are to be encouraged to use Covid health passports as a key part of moves to not just open up the economy for a short burst, but enable it to stay open longer term.
SITA: Lessons from the Lab
Using the Aruba Health App, visitors to the island who provided the required health tests to the Aruba government were issued a unique trusted traveler credential using blockchain technology. This credential was then verified by hotels, restaurants, and entertainment venues through the unique QR code on a visitor's mobile device without sharing any private data. The digital credential also enabled the Aruba government to restrict visitors from leaving their hotel rooms until they had received a negative PCR test result.
Business Case
SSI Business Models and Go-to-Market Stepan Gershuni
Historic development of online businesses was tightly associated with selling user data, traffic or ads. Marc Andreessen notes that this is not due to some intrinsic superiority of such models — but rather just due to the fact that there was no secure and reliable online payment method during the first 10–15 years of the internet era.
How Verifiable Credentials can Create New SaaS and Recurring Revenue Models Mathieu Glaude
There’s an opportunity to begin issuing credentials that can be reused within a particular ecosystem, and at various touch-points during the consumer lifecycle. Credentials unlock serious value for subscription.
MyData
Governance as a game changer aNewGovernance
we put a great emphasis on our international dimension: we believe we are contributing to building a new paradigm that should be shared beyond the European borders. The objective is to encourage human-centric fair use of data (primary, secondary…), moving away from both All-State and Platform-centric (Winner takes all) models.
Walking the Talk of Respectful Marketing Me2BAllliance
Our challenges are in the myriad of status quo marketing tools and techniques that don’t align with the new model of respectful marketing. Can we use analytics to be more effective yet still respect our visitors? Can we ethically use tools provided by big tech companies if their principles don’t seem to align with ours? While this is challenging, it is also exciting to help pioneer this new inevitable model.
Research Papers
Decentralised digital identity: what is it, and what does it mean for marginalised populations?
Margie Cheesman, digital anthropologist, and doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute, explores the subject of decentralised digital identity, what it is and what it means for marginalised populations.
An Accessible Interface Layer for Self-Sovereign Identity
The mechanisms and evolving standards collectively known as self-sovereign identity (SSI) offer the prospect of a decentralized Internet by providing a central pillar for a human-centered data ecosystem (HCDE).
Identity not SSI
The Working Principles of 2FA (2-Factor Authentication) Hardware
In 2019, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced Web Authentication API (WebAuthn), the new global standard comprising the implementation of FIDO U2F security keys in most modern browsers. By that time, Google already eliminated phishing attacks by having its 85,000 employees use hardware tokens.
Beyond Identity
Working With Intelligent Machines Jon Udell
Here is Copilot’s tagline: “Your AI pair programmer: get suggestions for whole lines or entire functions right inside your editor.”
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