📯 The last month has seen a lot of activity on interoperability (test suites getting mature and documented, with profiles on the horizon) and #IIW32 had a distinctly heads-down, "let's build this" vibe to match. Spring is the season for groundwork, planting, and nurturing, after all.
Table of contents
🚀 Foundation News
Steering Committee Elections - nominate now
We made a quick explainer on our blog to clear up the procedure in anticipation of next month's elections.
In short, if you are a DIF member and have someone in mind who should help DIF's governing board send their name and email to nominations@identity.foundation
DIF Grants
The DIF has officially launched a lightweight mini-grant program so that members (or the Steering Committee itself) can directly and transparently incentivize community contributions like editorship of a spec or implementations of specs. For more information, see our new blog.
Killer Whale Jello Bowl Death Match Redux: The Reckoning
At #IIW32, a mammoth and consequential conversation spanned 4 intense, jam-packed sessions and set new highs for IIW session-name silliness culminating in a massive interoperability watershed and widespread buy-in from many communities! The details of what gets built are being worked out in a new work item of the Claims & Credentials WG, building on the recent donation to DIF of the Bloom WACI extension to Presentation Exchange. The goal is both a minimum viable implementable spec for cross-stack credential exchange ("v0.1 scope"), and a longer-term commitment to a more fully-featured iteration of the same spec ("v1 scope"). Stay tuned!
IIW32 - A wave of DIF donations and debuts
The notes are now available for all the sessions. Mixed in among the usual avalanche of updates and report-outs from established subcommunities like KERI (and its new offshoot, ADPL), DIDComm, Sidetree, and SDS (see below!) were a few smaller items that our readers would overlook at their own peril: Animo (NL) gave a tour of their AcaPy extension project that bridges the divide between Aries and CCG/LD and Bloom debuted their WACI spec mentioned above, which facilitates Presentation-Exchange based exchanges and is in the process of being donated at time of press. A couple new projects, consortia and startups were
Wallet Security WG is starting.
Stay tuned and register for the mailing list
2nd Round of eSSIF-lab grants for European startups
The second rounds of both the infrastructure call and the business call will soon be open and accepting applications and inquiries!
🛠️ Group Updates
☂️ InterOp WG (cross-community)
- Nick Mothershaw (OIX) from Open Identity Exchange spoke about the guide to define, enforce and compare trust frameworks (with explicit attention to and feedback on the equivalency of and upgrade path for decentralized identity), with Pamela Dingle (Microsoft) as respondent
- VC status review and discussion
- crowd-editing session hacking away at v1 of DIF's new public-facing, entry-level FAQ for basic SSI topics
- IIW panel and workshop scope review
💡 Identifiers & Discovery
- Updates to Universal Resolver/Registrar configuration, and work on [Helm charts](https://github.com/decentralized-identity/charts.
- [Philip Feairheller, Sam Smith] KERI-based DID methods, and use of DID Resolution metadata
- IOP Chooser
- Universal Resolver Driver Policy Discussion
- DID resolution over DIDComm to a Universal Resolver
- Review .well-known and did:web
- Breaking changes in DID Core JSON-LD context
- Strictly speaking, all UR DID method implementations are now broken.
- Discussion around changing JSON-LD contexts, caching, versioning, hashlinks
- UR could implement a "fixing layer" for a transitional period, and simultaneously try to motivate implementers to fix their drivers.
- Universal Resolver policy questions about driver submission and maintenance
- UR currently supports several DID methods that are not in the DID spec registries.
- Probably DIF should have stricter policies going forward (e.g. only accept drivers for DID methods in the W3C method registry)
- group will generate a proposal
🛡️ Claims & Credentials
- MetaMask Credentials- Upgrading EIP712 (Spruce+Consensys Mesh)
- WACI PE-X meetings (during IIW) and first meeting to settle basics
- meeting notes from 26th April, pre-work item meeting
- goal to have a spec in 1-2 months, ready to use by the Health Pass project
- See WACI draft spec for context (Bloom)
- VC Marketplace focuses on wrap up / writedown.
- focusing more on use-cases
- Credential Manifest is considering multi credential issuance
- map descriptors are worked on by Bloom
- Review UVI (Essiflab)
🔓 DID Auth
- DIF-OIDF joint meetings - follow along on the bitbucket issues if the timing doesn't work for you!
- On 29th April SIOP/DIF represented by Kristina at the OIDF workshop.
- OIDF Special call:
- Support request and VC in user endpoint (through OIDC)
- review “medi connect” options
- the call time has been modified to incorporate more timezones
📻 DID Comm
-
IIW32 Sessions with consequences/interest for DIDCommers:
- Jello Bowl Death Match (Didcomm-PeX/WACI work item starting up in CC WG)
- ECDH-1PU vs everything else (chat related discussion)
- ECDH-ES
- Authenticated Encryption
- Andrew's Idea: https://hackmd.io/gC4ItH4IQKS_at8P8RyQOQ?view
- KID/SKID Related Topics
- ESKID
- Encrypted Sender
- PRs
- Discussion Topics
- DIDComm RecipientKeys: Signing vs Encryption
- KERI Event Logs
📦 Secure Data Storage
- calls are alternating weekly between the two specifications: Identity Hubs and EDVs
- SDS EDV call
- The need in the new EDV repo to be cleansed of hubs related work, and the same applies to Identity Hub repo
- Add batch operation service
- Batch operations are required (Derek) by citing the issues with HTTP signing performance when using a remote KMS.
- The architecture of batch APIs and how these influence implementation complexities.
- Add option to get full documents from queries
- Proposed: new features to be merged into the spec, if no objection, but marked with "at risk" until at least 2 implementations are confirmed
🔧 KERI
- Agreement ADPL and KEL: restore anchor to inception (required for NFT, essential to TrustFrame).
- Use more generic term in spec documentation for external support infrastructure, 'endorser' instead of original 'witness'. This does not require changing abbreviated labels in existing code/prefix tables.
- Should we genericise label? compact labels already consumed e, s (for endorser, supporter) synomym backer, b is not consumed. Otherwise leave as w.
- Restore External Content Anchoring to Inception Event #140
- Revised KSN key state notification message #130
- Roadmap:
- Witness support code in KERIpy. ready to test build demo.
- Added repo for keri-dht-py Conrad Rosenbrock contributor.
- did:keri method spec draft
did:peeris an intermediate step until KERI direct mode is live
⚙️ Product Managers
- Workday education wallet demo
- history of changes that lead to current key management profile
- Q&A on roadmap, VC issuance, formats etc.
🪙 Finance & Banking SIG
- Alex David, Global Business Development Manager @ Raon
- Adrian Doerk @ Main Incubator
- Relevant projects list Wiki
🏥 Healthcare SIG
- Still hibernating-- contact the interim chair to get involved if you would like to wake the sleeping giant from its slumber!
🦄 Member Updates
DIF Associate members are encouraged to share tech-related news in this section. For more info, get in touch with operations.
- Affinidi
- Free webinar on the topic of Verifiable Credentials, presented by Affinidi and KILT Protocol, organized by BerChain.
eSSIF LAB (EU) - Infrastructure-Oriented call
- Infrastructure-Oriented Open Call, with grants of up to 155 000 € (9 months projects).
- The call is open to European innovators and focuses on the development and interop testing of open-source SSI components.
- Some examples of SSI components include Wallets, server proxies, revocation, cryptographic enforcer policies, integration, interoperability, compatibility, just to name a few.
- Please note the final-round deadline: 7th July 2021, 13:00 CET (Brussels local time).
eSSIF LAB (EU) - First Business-oriented Call
- Infrastructure-Oriented Open Call, with grants of up to 106 000 € .
- The call is open to European innovators and focuses on extending of the eSSIF-Lab basic infrastructure/architecture with business solutions that makes it easy for organizations to deploy and/or use SSI, reduce business risks, facilitate alignment of business information, etc.
- Please note the final round opens 7th July 2021, 13:00 CET (Brussels local time).
Other NGI Open Calls (EU)
- Funding is allocated to projects using short research cycles targeting the most promising ideas. Each of the selected projects pursues its 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 amounts of funding.
🖋️ DIF Media
Setting Interoperability Targets
Our short-term roadmaps need testable, provable alignment goals that we can all agree on for our little communities and networks of technological thinking to converge gradually. In the newest DIF blog post, the Interop WG Chairs overview today's rapidly-maturing landscape of test suites, proto-trustmarks, and alignment roadmaps and the like.
Introducing DIF Grants
DIF is kicking off a program to administer narrowly-scoped financial support for community initiatives, ranging in format from grants to more competitive implementation bounties, hackathon-style open collaborations, and security reviews. Keep reading
Steering Committee Elections are just around the corner!
We made a quick explainer on our blog to clear up the procedure in anticipation of next month's elections. Nominations are still open so take some time to consider getting more involved in the decentralized work of steering this ship of {'foo':"bar"}s!
DIF FAQ is online and accepting issues/PRs
In the spirit of complementarity with CCG's educational & onboarding efforts, DIF staff and volunteers from the Interoperability WG have been working for months on setting up a Frequently Asked Questions page built using DIF's in-house specification authoring tool, Spec-Up. If you would like to donate a question (and/or an answer!) please create an issue on the github repo for the faq.
🎈 Events
Identiverse 2021
June 21 - 23, 2021: Hybrid Experience
June 23 - July 2, 2021: Continued Experience
💼 Jobs
Members of the Decentralized Identity Foundation are looking for:
- Software engineer (remote)
- SDK developer (Berlin, DE)
Check out the available positions here.
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