Identosphere 57 • Digital ID and the Metaverse • becoming a Hyperledger Maintainer • DID Linked Domains
Weekly review of news surrounding decentralized identity, standardization and data privacy.
This weekly newsletter is possible thanks to readers like you!
Consider paying us a small amount each month via Patreon
Support our work on Patreon — Get Exclusive Content!!
Read previous issues and Subscribe : newsletter.identosphere.net
Contact \ Content Submissions: newsletter [at] identosphere [dot] net
Upcoming
THE MODERN DILEMMA - HOW TO TAKE BACK CONTROL OF YOUR DIGITAL SOUL • 11/16 • JOSS GIFFARD-BURLEY • WACOM
Creative Rights • ID and Signature • Technology
Engineering Successful IAM Projects to Support Digital Business 11/23 KuppingerCole
Registration Open for OpenID Foundation Virtual Workshop 12/9
Self-issued OpenID Provider (SIOP) Update Kristina Yasuda – Microsoft
Logging off Facebook, what comes next? Planetwork 11/12
A half-day unconference for technologists who are making alternatives to Facebook; policy makers with ideas about how to fix, regulate and/or break-up Facebook; and organizers looking for answers that address Facebook's central and toxic role in civic life.
Explainer
Nomadic Labs Research Seminars #20 | Self-Sovereign Identity and Storage
This session features a presentation by Wayne Chang who introduces Self-Sovereign Identity and Storage.
In this talk, Wayne reviews the results of support with Tezos addresses, use cases that have been deployed, Tezos DID methods and Tezos profiles. Wayne also gives an overview of the Trail of Bits audit.
Verifying documents & identity in the public services and beyond OpenAccessGovernment • David Chadwick
A particularly useful aspect of the Verifiable Credentials standard is that the parties undertake the specific roles of Issuer, Holder or Verifier, but they are not constrained in how many roles, or when, they can employ them. Each party can be a device, a person or an institution, meaning that verifications can take place directly between automated systems, even verifying that each other is genuine before establishing a connection to share data
Let’s talk about digital identity with Oscar Santolalla, Nat Sakimura and Petteri Stenius
the history of OpenID Connect and how it became so prevalent, with special guests Nat Sakimura, Chairman at the OpenID Foundation, and Petteri Stenius, Principal Scientist at Ubisecure. [...]
“New technology seldomly completely replaces the older technologies. They will form additional layers, and slowly start replacing it.”
Decentralized identities ≠ blockchain Jolocom
Decentralized digital identities are only possible due to cryptography. One of the cornerstones is asymmetric encryption. A key pair is generated using a cryptographic process. The pair consists of a public and a private key. As the names suggest, the private key must remain private and the public key can be shared.
Company News
PUBLISH pitches world’s first decentralized identity solution for journalists to International Federation of Journalists
PUBLISH CEO Sonny Kwon gave an overview of a press ID app PUBLISH is building in collaboration with the Journalists Association of Korea (JAK). He explained that the mobile application, which leverages decentralized identity (DID) technology to manage press credentials, would help the JAK combat misinformation and reduce administrative costs associated with its current press credentialing process.
Evernym: October 2021 Release Notes
Singapore Fintech Festival…Here We [Affinidi] Come!
In this virtual booth, you can explore about Self-Sovereign Identity, Verifiable Credentials and their implementation, selective disclosure, identity wallet, and anything else related to decentralized identity and web 3.0.
Metaverse
The Rise of MetaNations Tim Bouma
what’s the imperative for us as real people and governments? To make sure that these realms are as open and inclusive as possible. Personally for me, I don’t want to have a future where certain metacitizens can exert their metarights in an unfair way within the real world; the chosen few getting to the front of the line for everything.
The idea of Self-sovereign identity, Decentralized Identifiers, and MetaVisa
Importantly, the verifier and the issuer never actually interact directly. They only ever compare notes in the ledger. The process only begins when you kick start it, reveals only the information you want to reveal, and doesn’t require an all-powerful centralized authority holding all the private keys to work.
NFTs, the Metaverse, and Digital Identity ContinuumLoop
Imagine a 3D immersive environment along the lines of Second Life. You “decorate” your “home” with “art”. You pop up an obligatory Persistence of Memory Dali print. But is it “real” and what does real even mean? In the physical realm, we know that this is only one original, which is at the MOMA in NYC. But what about the various quality prints that I can buy – at the MOMA, on Amazon, on the street.
Data Privacy
FTC’s Shot Across the Bow: Purpose and Use Restrictions Could Frame The Future of Personal Data Management Identity Praxis
So that there is no uncertainty or doubt, however, Duball4 reports that, while consumer privacy is a chief concern for the commission, it is not the primary concern to the exclusion of other concerns. The commission is also worried about algorithmic bias and “dark patterns” practices.
75% of Americans Want National Data Privacy Standards Anonyme
The clear majority of adults surveyed want national standards around how companies collect, process and share personal data to help protect users’ privacy and security online. Seven in 10 people agree with the federal government treating personal data security as a national security issue and investing in cybersecurity.
Public Sector
Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) schemes and the public sector Impulse H20
While the structural difference between SSI approaches and conventional centralised or federated eID schemes is, on one level, profound (full control over data and identity with the user; no third-party intermediary between the user and the service provider), on another level, these differences may also appear highly abstract to ordinary users. What societal and economic consequences they may unfold remains, so far, little understood, also because research on the real social and economic effects of SSI solutions is only beginning.
Standardization
Mission Accomplished: Universal Resolver Calls coming to an end Identity Foundation
Considering that the group has accomplished these goals, there is currently no more need for dedicated calls. Work on the Universal Resolver work item will continue on Github (under the Universal Resolver and Identifiers &Discovery repositories) and on DIF Slack in the Identifiers & Discovery Working Group channel, #wg-id.
First Official Me2B Alliance Recommendation
In a sense, this recommendation is a kind of abbreviation of the key things that our specifications test for. And you’ll be able to see that soon as the Me2B Safe Website Specification for Respectful Technology is currently in the membership review stage of the approval process.
The Pathway to Becoming a Hyperledger Maintainer
In this blogpost I’m going to share what it’s like to be a maintainer for the Hyperledger Aries project. You’ll learn how you can start contributing and maybe even set yourself on a path to becoming a maintainer.
Indicio’s support for the W3C DID Specification and its path to standardization
The position of Indicio is that the DID Specification is of signal importance to creating a better digital world. We recognize that, as with any specification, improvements can and will be made in the future; but we back its recommendations and its approval.
Link your domain to your Decentralized Identifier (DID) (preview)
We make a link between a domain and a DID by implementing an open standard written by the Decentralized Identity Foundation called Well-Known DID configuration. The verifiable credentials service in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) helps your organization make the link between the DID and domain by including the domain information that you provided in your DID, and generating the well-known config file:
Use Cases
Building the Social Graph Infrastructure for Web3.0: How CyberConnect is using Ceramic to connect everyone in Web3.0
At the heart of CyberConnect is a tamper-proof data structure that efficiently facilitates the creation, update, query and verification of user-centric data. Long-term data retention on CyberConnect is guaranteed through Ceramic’s blockchain anchoring and a custom data pinning service.
Verifiable Credentials set to Revolutionize Health and Safety Compliance Dock
By integrating with Dock and utilizing verifiable credentials, the process of verifying a workers qualifications goes from analysing paper-based certificates and calling each educational body to certify the legitimacy of it, to having the accreditations sitting in a tamper-proof digital wallet, with a digital signature signature from the issuing body certifying the legitimacy.
Building a digital trust ecosystem for mining in British Columbia IBM
The Mines Digital Trust Ecosystem wallet uses verifiable credentials which are enhanced digital versions of physical credentials. The Mines Digital Trust Ecosystem is built on technology that is highly transparent, secure, tamper-proof, and immutable. From the moment information is stored, it cannot be changed. Credentials can be revoked and re-issued as business processes dictate.
Airports continue to deploy biometrics as SSI ‘big wave’ approaches Biometric Update
The conflation of biometrics and SSI is somewhat disturbing.
TravelScrum Co-founder and Chairman Gene Quinn described self-sovereign ID (SSI) as “a big wave of change that’s coming,” and advised that organizations can “ride this wave by swimming at it, greeting it, and rolling gently over it as it heads to shore, or you can be caught in the shore-break and have it consume you later.”
Picos at the Edge Windley
You can play with this first hand at NoFilter.org, which brands itself as a "the world's first unstoppable, uncensorable, undeplatformable, decentralized freedom of speech app." There's no server storing files, just a set of Javascript files that run in your browser. Identity is provided via Metamask which uses an Ethereum address as your identifier. I created some posts on NoFilter to explore how it works.
Organizations
MYDATA, MY CLIMATE, AND MY CARBON
With COP26 taking place this week, governments, companies, and individuals are discussing how we can all reduce our carbon emissions. The task is monumental, and technology has an important role to play – both in reducing its own carbon footprint and in helping the wider world track and reduce their emissions.
Non-binary Thinking will Accelerate Digital Sovereignty (with Rouven Heck) NorthernBlock
Now, if we take two communities within the SSI space – the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) and the Trust over IP Foundation (ToIP). I will sometimes hear people talking positively about one and negatively about the other. But why is this happening? Don’t we all have the same underlying values? Aren’t we all looking to better our lives through digital sovereignty?
I think the answer to this is clear and we need to get away from thinking in a binary manner about anything in our space. And if you really look at the overlap between both these communities: they are quite large.
Identity not SSI
Auth0 Integration with Singpass
This is the first of a two-post series. In this post, we’ll learn how to integrate Singpass QR Login with Auth0 Universal Login. In the next post, we’ll look into integrating Myinfo to share selective personal data such as name and email address.
India Will Once Again Require Biometric Attendance for Government Employees
Public institutions in India will soon be resuming their use of contact-based biometric sensors. Biometric authentication had been mandatory for all government employees prior to the pandemic, but the Indian central government was one of several institutions that suspended the practice due to health concerns following the outbreak of COVID-19.
Danger
“The power to surveil, control, and punish”: The dystopian danger of a mandatory biometric database in Mexico RestofWorld.org
there is a push by corporations and international institutions such as the World Bank to create these kinds of databases to identify people and conflate two things: the right of every person to be recognized legally by a government and an identification system that intermediates people’s transactions with public and even private services.
Thanks for Reading!
Read more \ Subscribe: newsletter.identosphere.net
Support this publication: patreon.com/identosphere
Contact \ Submission: newsletter [at] identosphere [dot] net