📯 Between Good Health Pass work, WACI-PEx, and lots of OIDF activity, there has been more prototyping and less discussion than average this month, but there are plenty of announcements just around the corner: not one but two new working groups at DIF, lessons from WACI-PEx being folded back into its source protocols, the European Commission releasing more technical details about its next steps, and much more.

Table of contents

  1. Group Updates; 2. Member Updates; 3. Funding; 4. Members; 5. Jobs; 6. Metrics; 7. Join DIF

🚀 Foundation News

DIF Communication Director.

DIF is looking for a part-time Communications director/manager to manage and coordinate DIF’s communications channels and overall messaging strategy.

Steering Committee Elections - results are in and ratified!

We had a strong number of candidates representing many faces of our growing decentralized identity community, and our first election according to the new election process went smoothly. The steering committee now consists of:

  • Kendra Bittner (Workday, US)
  • Daniel Buchner (Microsoft, US)
  • Juan Caballero (Spruce, US)
  • Sam Curren (Indicio, US)
  • Karyl Fowler (Transmute, US)
  • Joachim Lohkamp (Jolocom, DE)
  • Catherine Nabbala (Finema, TH)
  • Markus Sabadello (DanubeTech, AT)
  • Brent Zundel (Evernym, US)

Wallet Security WG begins its work

After a long process of finding leadership, hammering out a charter, and defining an optimistic scope, the new transatlantic leadership is hammering out a tentative work plan and scope reductions to line up all the ducks. Public meetings have begun this week to include the whole working group in this discussion about deliverables and timelines. Stay tuned and register for the mailing list.

First public meeting of the Cryptography WG approaches

A younger group with a narrower scope has, in parallel, also been forming around cryptographic primitives and dependency analysis. Leadership has already been selected by consensus and the charter is being fine-tuned-- a charter DocuSign and a scheduling doodle might be ready for interested parties as soon as time of press for the next newsletter. Join the mailing list in the meantime if specifying cryptographic primitives across different tooling stacks sounds like a priority for your organization.

🛠️ Group Updates

☂️ InterOp WG (cross-community)

  • Jace from Bloom gave us a tour of the WACI spec.
  • Q&A about the v0.1 and v1 scopes for the WACI-PEx work item/draft spec, with Brent Zundel (work item maintainer) as respondent.
  • Blogpost on Setting Interop Targets.
  • IIW Review and discussion on the best sessions. All notes can be found here.
  • iGrant presented on their Aries Interop Playground harness (for background, see this recording of an earlier presentation and Q&A about the Playground at a ToIP call) and Indy/AIP interop journey so far.

💡 Identifiers & Discovery

  • Alen Horvat (AceBlock) is now co-chair of ID WG, replacing Sam Smith (KERI WG, Sovrin Foundation, ProSapien) who is stepping down to focus more on the new WG.
  • New Special Work Item Calls
  • Persistence and versioning of JSON-LD contexts, and implications on Linked Data Signatures.
  • Data structures and other topics in the CCG's Universal Wallet Interop specification.
  • Discussion of Fission (CA)'s proposed approach to DID resolution / discovery in signing up for an account / linking DIDs.
    • Giving every user an end-to-end encrypted data store building on IPFS
    • Fission-specific, human-readable user-account namespace for discovery and usability, with each account controlling a DID "under the hood"
  • UNIVERSAL REGISTRAR - An Overview
    • Issue: Onboarding/getting access to a DID registry is usually DID-registry-specific.
    • Proposals:
      • Consider the most frequent flows:
        • Redirect to a webpage (authentication or other operations are performed outside the wallet)
        • Authentication via API (some existing Universal Registrar drivers support this)
      • Proposal should work for most DID methods (e.g., did:web, Sovrin, sidetree).
      • A more detailed compatibility analysis is required.
    • Outcomes: Proposals will be further analysed and discussed in the Universal Registration call. Issues will be opened in the Universal Registration repository
    • Discussions about:
      • Gataca's DID method.
      • Historical resolution & different properties/categories of methods WRT historical options.
      • DID revocation: historical signature retroactively invalidated or do they survive?

🛡️ Claims & Credentials

  • Workitem Status: WACI-PEX - Breakneck specification/prototyping underway of a Presentation Exchange extension that would make a "minimum viable" cross-stack VC flow. See InteropWG section for scope/explanation.
  • Workitem Status: PE (Maintenance) + Credential Manifest - monitoring developments in CM, WACI-PEx, OIDF, and Aries RFCs with an eye to next major version.
  • Workitem Status: VC Marketplace
    • Plug-fest idea to create a 6-8week sprint to prove the viability of the work-item
  • Microsoft kicking off the first donation to a DIF Grant: Funding will support a refresh/upgrade of the JwtProof2020 signature suite and other dependencies of JWT libraries developed in and maintained in DIF.

🔓 DID Auth

  • DIF-OIDF joint meetings - follow along on the bitbucket issues if the timing doesn't work for you!
  • DID Chooser for SIOP.
  • OIDC VPs draft document was ADOPTED by A/B Connect WG within OIDF, iterative evolution to follow (specifying grants, incl SIOPv2!)
  • Other adjacent specs and documents such as Mattr/Convergence Cred Prov spec & Claims Aggregation spec (N. Sakimura's more general, accomodates VC+Other claims) also being worked on in parallel and aligned.
  • Aligning VP draft and PresEx being actively discussed already - some good DIF involvement there for now - reach out if you want to support and get involved representing DIF!

📻 DID Comm

  • Discussion on Keys By Value / ID issue.
  • XChaCha / Ethereum Compatible Key Wrapping - Oliver
  • Sender Key/ID Encryption
  • Keys by Value or By ID
  • PRs
    • 195 - anoncrypt warning/non-normative headsup.
    • 185 - kid and skid headers.
    • 172 - Fix inconsistencies with to/next attributes in a forwarded message.
    • 161 - Attachments.

📦 Secure Data Storage

  • Calls are alternating weekly between the two specifications: Identity Hubs and EDVs.
  • EDV:
  • Identity Hub: Review candidate issues for transfer; discuss DAG-JOSE and other implementation details around interfaces and encodings.

🔧 KERI

🌱 Sidetree

  • Sidetree DID Type Registry approved during WG Call.
  • DID Test Suite now has an Ion entry and an Orb entry!
    * equivalentID and canonicalId and DIDComm Service Blocks all represented in DID-Core (no longer at risk?)
  • outstanding issues:
    • work items for specifying generalizable Orb primitive (like activity anchors) need to be spun up
    • Activity Anchors (core to Orb but more generalized) - how to anchor things (not just Sidetree event digests) in ActivityPub and CAS (i.e. IPFS)
  • Sidetree DID Type Registry - Daniel (https://github.com/decentralized-identity/sidetree/pull/1120/files)
    • Next action: clarify how the type number is related to the Sidetree property value.

⚙️ Product Managers

  • Presentation: "Open Badges and Verifiable Credentials: how to build the ecosystem."
  • Discussed future topics to work on.
    • What is the credential payload? (Keith can format presentation)
    • Usability demos + conversations
    • How do we make wallets accessible to everyone?
    • How do I trust the issuer?
    • What do interoperable ecosystems look like?
    • Business Models for Respective Markets

💴 Finance & Banking SIG

  • Invited speaker Nacho Alamillo Domingo from Alastria.

🏥 Healthcare SIG

  • Hibernated until further notice.

🦄 Member Updates

DIF Associate members are encouraged to share tech-related news in this section. For more info, get in touch with operations.

  • Affinidi
    • Affinidi's PoCathon 2021, a virtual hackathon for developing verifiable credential based applications concluded and the winners have been announced. Check out the 25+ Proofs of concepts that have been submitted by the participants in this link!
    • Check out this article describing the similarities and differences between NFTs and VCs.

💰 Funding

OSCAR HAS AN EMA

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).

Apply here

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 deadline:  7th July 2021, 13:00 CET (Brussels local time).

Apply here

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.

Learn more here.

🎈 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.

🔢 Metrics

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Website: 19.080 unique visitors

In the last 30 days.

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