October, 2020
Welcome to the 2020 October issue of DIF Monthly, the monthly newsletter of Decentralized Identity Foundation! Read below for the latest updates on the work of the decentralized identity community every month.
Foundation News
DIF, going forward will use “main” instead of “master” branch across its new repositories. If your team is also interested to align with this movement please consider learning more about it here.
Today is the start of IIW #31! Join in at the last minute with the DIF discount code that you can find at the Events section below.
🛠️ Working Group Updates
☂️ InterOp WG (cross-community)
Recommendations and test suits for interoperability across all adjacent communities working on decentralized identities.
Interim Chairs: Pamela Dingle, Kaliya Young, Juan Caballero
Page : <interop>
- Wallet Credential Format Grid - crowdsourcing is ongoing, please contribute!
- Decentralized Mapping Exercise (now in handy PDF with explanatory text!)
- Cross-Community Familiarity Self-Assessment
- How-to mini-lessons for first-time implementations (discussed)
- 1st cluster will break down BBS+ selective disclosure support into smaller building blocks discussion - scheduled for after IIW.
- In the near future:
- You can join the mailing list by signing up here; Wiki, here.
Identifiers & Discovery
How people, organizations, and devices can be identified and located without centralized systems.
Chairs: Markus Sabadello & Sam Smith
Page: <ID WG>
- Discuss the use of DID Resolution metadata for KERI / did:un.
- Added JSON-LD document-loader as Work Item. Link. (Will be introduced on Nov 4. Interop call and posted to YouTube)
- Use of DIDs in OIDC, SIOP (“DID Auth”).
- WebID by W3C Web Incubator Community Group. Link.
Use of the initial-state DID URL parameter, and “canonical DIDs”.
In the near future:
- Continue working on KERI and did:un.
- Upgrading Universal Resolver and Universal Registrar to reflect the latest developments in DID Core.
- Updates on Fuzzy Encryption & other key recovery schemes.
🛡️ Claims & Credentials
Verifying claims and assertions of identities.
Chairs: Martin Riedel, Wayne Chang & Gabe Cohen Reynolds
Page: <CC WG>
- Gabe Cohen replaces Jonathan Reynolds (both Workday)
- Presentation Exchange spec development in home stretch
- Procedural upgrades proposal being trialed for later DIF-wide adoption
- (New) Work Item Process - via GH issues in Group-specific repo
- General Updates (Agenda, Call Transcript, Recording,…)
DID Auth
DID-based authentication specs, standards, and libraries.
Chairs: Kyle den Hartog & Oliver Terbu
Page: <DIDAuth>
- SIOP update from OIDC.
- RadicalLedger donated DID-SIOP v0.1 browser extension implementation shown at the June DIF F2F
Sidetree
The development and maintenance of the formal Sidetree specification,
Chairs: Tobias Looker & Daniel Buchner
Page: <sidetree>
- Property renaming - pull 881
- Canonical identifiers - Issue 421
- Method equivalent identifiers pull 431
- Discussion topic: user-editable field vs method produced identifier.
- Discussion: verifiable credential usage, zcap usage, and verification relationships.
- SIP1/SIP2.
DID Comm
Specifications, protocols, and formats developed for authentication data structures.
Chairs: Sam Curren, Oliver Terbu & Tobias Looker
Page: <DIDComm>
- Didcomm.org is a DIDcomm WG managed site, more info will be here repo
- IIW preparations
- Encoding Types Issue 112
- Trust Ping PR 97
- Feature Discovery PR 98
- Revise Overview PR 93
- Sig Section PR 120
- DIDComm over gRPC Issue 113
- Perfect Forward Secrecy details PR 117
- Big presentations on implementer’s guide (first internal - 9-21, Aries WG second) about v2 feature set
Secure Data Storage
Create one or more specifications to establish a foundational layer for secure data storage.
Chairs: Kaliya Young, Tobias Looker & Dmitri Zagidulin
Page: <SDS>
- Focus on the search for the name for the specification
- Vote options on the mailing list
- Authorization discussion
🦄 Member Updates
_DIF members are encouraged to share tech-related news in this section. For more info, get in touch with operations. _
Affinidi
- Affinidi is a decentralized identity ecosystem that currently powers multiple startups & enterprise pilots around the world. This week, we open-sourced our core stack, which we have built-in collaboration with the SSI community.
- Visit our Github & documentation portal to learn more!
- Join our community slack;
- To get involved with Affinidi, reach out to us via email: bizdev@affinidi.com or Twitter: @affinidi
- Polimec (Polkadot Liquidity Mechanism): A Fundraising Mechanism for the Polkadot Ecosystem. Link.
Bloom
- Blog post on how we can achieve unsecured DeFi lending via SSI technology. Link.
Nuggets
- Nuggets were successful in their G-Cloud 12 application and two of their solutions are now live on the Digital Marketplace - an online service for UK public sector organizations to find companies and technology for their digital projects. Link.
- BusinessCloud’s 100 FinTech Disrupters is an annual ranking, profiling the UK’s most innovative FinTech start-ups, scale-ups & established companies. We’re pleased to report that Nuggets has been placed at No.42 on the list, alongside established names such as Revolut, Starling Bank & Checkout.com. Link.
Funding
NGI Open Calls (EU)
- Funding is allocated to projects using short research cycles targeting the most promising ideas. Each of the selected projects pursues their own objectives, while the NGI RIAs provide the program logic and vision, technical support, coaching and mentoring, to ensure that projects contribute towards a significant advancement of research and innovation in the NGI initiative.
- The focus is on advanced concepts and technologies that link to relevant use cases and that can have an impact on the market and society overall. Applications and services that innovate without a research component are not covered by this model.
- Varying amount of funding
- Learn more here.
🖋️ DIF Media
KERI: For every DID, a microledger
by DIF on DIF Medium
“The Digital Identity Foundation (DIF) is very proud to be hosting one particular research and development project that could prove pivotal in this process. It is currently a work item of DIF’s Identifiers and Discovery Working Group. However, a charter for an autonomous working group will be available for review at #IIW31 this week (20–22 October 2020) to facilitate broader participation. The project is called KERI and it is a project that could only be developed in the open, for the public good and for the widest, quickest adoption.”
Drilling down: Open Standards
by DIF on DIF Medium
“In the software world, as in the world of trains, standards define a given market for products and services. Compliance tests make objective (and far less controversial) the question of whether or not a given product meets a given set of requirements. Explicitly-defined, testable protocols make products provably swappable and/or interoperable. Open standards processes try to define those tests and protocols in the open, with input from initial and future contenders in that market, speeding up the timeline to legitimacy by incorporating major players and incorporating widely-sourced input.”
Understanding DIDComm
by Kaliya Young on DIF Medium
“DIDComm is a cross-community standard that creates libraries and design patterns for two or more DID-controlling entities from diverse DID-based systems to communicate directly with one another. It creates a secure communication channel between software controlled by each of these entities, which can be people, organizations or things. This constitutes an “authenticated channel,” in that control of a given DID’s private keys is, barring a failure of design or operational security, proof of authenticity of the party represented by that DID.”
DIF at #IIW31
by Kaliya Young on DIF Medium
“DIF has had great success presenting work at IIW — and increasingly, it is becoming an important aspect of our educational and outreach efforts to post recordings of these presentations on our youtube channel. We’re hoping this tradition will build more momentum at the upcoming IIW!”
Events
#IIW Internet Identity Workshop
October 20-22, 2020 - Online
The Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) has been finding, probing, and solving identity issues several times per year since 2005. Every IIW moves topics, code, and projects downfield. Name an identity topic - it’s likely that more substantial discussion and work has been done at IIW than any other conference.
Register here (early bird sale ends on the 9th September)
EXCLUSIVE COUPON CODE: DIF_XXXI_20
Standict Evaluators Open Call
November 1, 2020
Become an external expert for the Standict.eu Fellowship Programme!
StandICT.eu 2023 is setting up an External Pool of Evaluators (EPE) to review proposals to the StandICT.eu Fellowship Programme, a cycle of 10 Open Calls running over the 36-month project lifetime, with a budget of 3 million Euro earmarked to support the participation of European standardization specialists in key international and global SDOs and consortia. Link.
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