Identosphere Weekly #13 • Identity Podcasts • Generativity of SSI • Company News
Identosphere Weekly #13 • Identity Podcasts • Generativity of SSI • Company News
⑬ Getting the new year off to a good start with another issue of updates in identity. Whatever the news cycle, there's always more to learn. ⑬
Happy New Year!!!
Thanks for reading Identosphere’s Weekly. The news doesn’t move too fast from the solstice through the new year, but that sure hasn’t stopped you from reading, and hasn’t stopped us from filling each newsletter with useful info.
We’re looking forward to unleashing the potential in this coming year, and bringing valuable new info-products to you.
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Upcoming Events
DIALOGUES ON DATA & POLICY: the 4.0, the identity and the privacy issue
In this workshop we want to bring together policy and industry experts and the emerging NGI ecosystem as it is growing with the innovators organized by DAPSI, the Data Portability & Services Incubator.
Thoughtful Biometrics Workshop
The Thoughtful Biometrics Workshop is creating a space to dialogue about critical emerging issues surrounding biometric and digital identity technologies. It’s happening the 1st week of February: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 9am PST to 1pm PST / Noon EST to 5 EST.
Other Conferences and Events
There are many other upcoming events you may be interested in that can be found at IdentityReview’s conferences and events page.
Podcasts
Listening to identity podcasts is our 2021 new year’s resolution
A gem we must have missed last month from Ubisecure, lists the identity podcasts that should be on our list.
Let’s Talk About Digital Identity (LTADI) – Ubisecure
Definitely Identity – Tim Bouma
PSA Today – Privacy, Surveillance and Anonymity by Kaliya Identity Woman and Seth Goldstein
ID Talk – FindBiometrics and, as you’d expect, focused on the biometrics space
State of Identity – OWI
Podcasts that didn’t make their list.
Identity, Unlocked – Auth0 (really great!)
If you can think of any identity podcasts that should be on this list, especially ones focused on SSI, it would be much appreciated if you leave a comment on this post at newsletter.identosphere.net or send a message to newsletter@identosphere.net.
Blog Posts
The Generative Self-Soverign Internet
Phil Windley published a fantastic post articulating the generativity of self sovereign identity. Kaliya agrees!
Generative systems use a few basic rules, structures, or features to yield behaviors that can be extremely varied and unpredictable.
Generativity is a function of a technology’s capacity for leverage across a range of tasks, adaptability to a range of different tasks, ease of mastery, and accessibility.
Jumpstart Global Travel Industry Using Self-Sovereign Identity for COVID-19 Immunity Credentials
Tata Consulting Services a vision for how SSI can be used to re-open global travel with the reality of COVID-19.
SSI still requires market validation, and support for its implementation is currently limited to a relatively small group of technologists and enthusiasts. However, the implementation of SSI in the travel industry at a future point in time, especially once the standards and protocols are production ready and existing user experience challenges have been resolved, is something that all travel industry stakeholders should be watching, waiting and ready for.
SSI as articulated by Energy Web Foundation
Digging Deeper into Self-sovereign Identity and Access Management
What we’d like to highlight in this simplified process is the fact that it is the user who stores the claim and anchors it on chain. Also, because it is a private claim, the contents are provable but not disclosed. The user can therefore prove that they have been granted a certain privilege, but unless they elect to disclose this information, it is impossible for a third party to find out.
And as the users must anchor the claim on-chain themselves, there is no opportunity for an observer to make a list of the addresses added to a particular smart contract or any other indirect way to observe the activities of the IAM. The only information an observer can garner is that the user has added a claim to their DID document but not the content, origin, or nature of the claim.
Towards Self-Sovereign Identity with Tykn Co-Founders, Khalid Maliki and Jimmy J.P. Snoek
The conversation details the 'three pillars of SSI' (verifiable credentials, decentralised identifiers and blockchain), how SSI fits with existing processes, what it should appear as to end users (and what level of education they need around the technology), the importance of accessibility for inclusivity, and what's next for Tykn. "In 5 years, people should take [SSI] for granted" Khalid Maliki
From the mailing lists
Presentation Exchange v1.0 Call for Review
Daniel Buchner shared on public-credentials@w3.org:
spreading the word that the Presentation Exchange v1.0 specification is now a Working Group Draft.
...codifies the Presentation Definition data format Verifiers can use to articulate proof requirements, as well as the Presentation Submission data format Holders can use to submit proofs in accordance with them. The specification is designed to be both claim format and transport envelope agnostic, meaning an implementer can use JSON Web Tokens (JWTs), Verifiable Credentials (VCs), JWT-VCs, or any other claim format, and convey them via Open ID Connect, DIDComm, Credential Handler API, or any other transport envelope.
Comments on the Draft are welcome through 03:59 UTC/GMT on 2021-01-22
Company Updates
Trinsic Year in Review 2020
Lots of good things happened!
Helped start the COVID-19 Credentials Initiative and has since worked with dozens of developers and organizations COVID-19 related SSI solutions:
Raised pre-seed funding and rebranded from Streetcred ID to Trinsic, becoming the first investment of Kickstart Seed Fund $110 million fund.
Indicio Tech
Indicio.Tech Incorporates as a Public Benefit Corporation
Indicio joins companies such as Patagonia and Kickstarter in embracing a corporate model that aligns shareholders and stakeholders around a shared mission to deliver a material benefit to society, not only through products and services and how they are made and delivered, but through prioritizing the welfare of employees, diversity and inclusion, and environmental impact.
Indicio.Tech releases Aries Mediator Agent
The Indicio Mediator Agent is the company’s latest contribution to Aries Cloud Agent Python (ACA-Py) and the Aries Toolbox. Following RFC 0211: Mediator Coordination, Indicio built on the work of the open-source community to make mediation interoperable and vendor agnostic. This expands the opportunities for mobile wallet implementations.
[...]
Indicio.tech is committed to becoming a resource-hub for decentralized identity, providing enterprise-grade open source tools to its clients and to the community. This includes the Private Networks build service, the Indicio TestNet, and a variety of customizable training programs.
IDRamp partners with Indicio.Tech
This is an interesting announcement with two companies partnering together to create new SSI services for the companies the work with.
Work on Aries
Becoming a Hyperledger Aries Developer
Course from the Linux Foundation
Learn how to develop blockchain-based production-ready identity applications with Hyperledger Aries in this free course.
60k contract to work on SSI with the BC Gov!
This opportunity is for developers familiar with Hyperledger Aries, Aries Protocols, Python and JSON-LD processing to add support in ACA-Py for several important VC formats used by a number of other organizations in the VC community.
Identity but not SSI
Near-Final Second W3C WebAuthn and FIDO2 CTAP Specifications
The W3C WebAuthn and FIDO2 working groups have been busy this year preparing to finish second versions of the W3C Web Authentication (WebAuthn) and FIDO2 Client to Authenticator Protocol (CTAP) specifications