DIF Newsletter #40

May 2024

DIF Website | DIF Mailing Lists | Meeting Recording Archive

Decentralized Identity Foundation News; 2. Working Group Updates; 3. Open Groups; 4. Announcements at DIF; 5. Community Events; 6. DIF Members; 7. Get involved! Join DIF

🚀 Decentralized Identity Foundation News

DIF at ID4Africa

DIF was honoured to participate at the ID4Africa 2024 AGM in Cape Town last week.

DIF's Catherine Nabbala and Damian Glover delivered a plenary presentation to the conference, together with Anand Acharya of Bhutan National Digital Identity.

The session highlighted DIF’s work within the broader landscape of national ID schemes and provided real-world insights into the implementation of decentralized identity by the Thai and Bhutanese governments.

The presentation elicited engagement with DIF from a variety of quarters, including several countries that are rolling out national digital identity programs, and others looking to do so.

Our conversations with stakeholders evidenced a strong desire for Africa-specific digital infrastructure, and awakening interest in decentralized identity as a tool to empower citizens and promote cross-border interoperability while avoiding lock-in to ecosystems controlled by outside interests.

Universal Resolver

The IOTA Digital Identity (DID) method is now resolvable using the DIF's Universal Resolver. The Universal Resolver is DIF-hosted infrastructure enabling resolution of any registered DID method through its flexible plugin model. This widely-used service is invaluable to the decentralized identity community. Accordingly, DIF has invested in boosting its reliability and stability to ensure uptime and availability of the Universal Resolver.

The Universal Resolver was generously developed and contributed by Danube Tech.

You can experiment with the Universal Resolver at https://uniresolver.io and even follow our simple process for allowing your own DID method to run in the Uniresolver.

As a non-profit, DIF funds and hosts public good infrastructure like the Universal Resolver. Support our efforts by joining DIF.

DIF adds new liaison IOVF

IOV Foundation’s mission is to create a new open financial ecosystem that provides accessible and fair services. They focus on Latin America, specifically demonstrating solutions for interoperability between governments (countries, cities) and organizations in Central and South America. Their current pilot focuses on building an identity platform for the Argentine Chamber of E-Commerce, aimed at managing event tickets and board meeting attendance.

Calling all DIDComm users!

Do you use DIDComm? We want to hear about it! Let us know how you're using DIDComm here.

🛠️ Working Group Updates

Claims & Credentials Working Group

Presentation Exchange 2.1 specification is published: https://identity.foundation/presentation-exchange/spec/v2.1.0/

Sam Curren presented the Credential Trust Establishment at the Trust over IP Foundation's trust registry task force.

After a successful webinar to drum up interest (see write-up here), we will be launching the credential schemas work item. Contact membership@identity.foundation if you are interested in participating.

If you are interested in participating in any of DIF's Working Groups, please click here.

🔐 Applied Cryptography WG

(1) We are waiting for IETF CFRG cryptographic review of the BBS Signature Scheme draft

(2) We are updating but haven't yet published a new version of "Blind BBS Signatures" which enables features like "anonymous holder binding"

(3) We are updating but haven't yet published a new version of "BBS per Verifier Linkability" (pseudonyms)

(4) Both these new drafts provide features that have been tentatively added to the W3C Data Integrity BBS candidate recommendations.

📖 Open Groups at DIF

Veramo User Group

The user group is currently focusing on integration of SD-JWT into Veramo, improving compatibility with the SES environment in Metamask snaps for Veramo 6.x, and some changes to key management with regards to usage in Metamask snaps.

We also had a demo/presentation by Index Network on their product / plans for Veramo.

📻 China SIG

During the SIG's May meeting last week, we shared the idea of SSI, global development trends, and next steps for technical, application and translation sub-groups, and held an open discussion.

Access the recording here.

The previous SIG meeting was held on 17 April. CAICT (the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology) contributed a basic un-finished digital identity framework for China SIG members to study and participate in coding together.

Access the recording here.

The China SIG's permanent online meeting address for its regular monthly meeting is: https://meeting.tencent.com/dm/c4cNcDCmssbc
Tencent Meeting Number：507-9656-6284

📢 Announcements at DIF

European Identity and Cloud Conference (EIC) 2024

[Photo by Levin on Unsplash]

DIF will have a significant presence at EIC next week. Many Steering Committee members will be attending and presenting at the conference, which takes place in Berlin from 3 - 7 June.

Executive Director Kim Hamilton Duffy teams up with SC member Steve McCown on the opening day of the conference to deliver a Decentralized Identity Technical Mastery Sprint, plus DIF members Wayne Chang of SpruceID, Riley Hughes of Trinsic, Nick Lambert of Dock and Daniel Buchner of Block (who is also an SC member) for panel discussions on days 2, 3 and 4.

SC member Markus Sabadello joins forces with Nat Sakimura, chairman of the OpenID Foundation to deliver a keynote on the opening night of the conference titled "The Dueling Narratives of Decentralized Identities".

SC member Sam Curren, Hospitality & Travel SIG co-chair Nick Price and Dr Abbie Barbir of DIF liaison partner FIDO Alliance are among those participating in other panel discussions focused on decentralized identity, including

Post Quantum Security: Cryptography in Decentralized Identity
Expert/Digital Wallet & Verifiers Q+A
Decentralized Identity for Onboarding & CIAM
Addressing Usability Challenges of Digital Identity Wallets
Decentralized Identity in Production

Check out the full agenda here.

DIF members are eligible for a 25% reduction on their ticket to attend EIC (on top of any other discounts). Simply enter code eic24dif25members during the last step of booking: click here to buy your ticket.

Please ensure your communications teams coordinate with us if you plan to attend, so we can assist in promoting your participation.

DIF Labs

The DIF Labs working group is coming soon; contact membership@identity.foundation to learn more

🗓️ ️Community Events

Bridging the Gap: OpenID and DIDComm

SC member Sam Curren and Artur Philipp from IDUnion unveiled OpenID-DIDComm, a new protocol that bridges OpenID4VC and DIDComm, enabling credential issuers and holders to communicate securely in a way that complies with EU requirements for credential exchange.

The community call was highly anticipated and was well attended, despite public holidays in the US and Europe.

Following an introduction by DIF’s Senior Director of Community Engagement, Limari Navarrete, Artur noted that there are many reasons why issuers and holders will need to communicate, though OpenID4VCI (OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance) only supports the initial credential exchange.

For example, an issuer may need to notify a holder that a credential has expired or been revoked. On the other hand, a holder may want to request a batch of additional credentials from the issuer (single-use SD-JWT credentials will be important to prevent correlation of the holder).

The mutual authentication that is integral to the DIDComm protocol provides resistance to phishing attacks, compared with approaches requiring switches to channels such as SMS or email. What’s more, the security properties of a DIDComm connection do not degrade over time. These and other features make DIDComm an excellent choice to establish a persistent communication channel between issuers and holders.

The next step is for the project team to validate that the new protocol does not interfere with OpenID4VCI, in consultation with the group developing the OpenID specification. Enabling DIDComm connections to be established over OpenID4VP (OpenID for Verifiable Presentations) will follow later.

Click here to read more about the OpenID-DIDComm protocol.

Credential Schema webinar recap

As mentioned in the Claims & Credentials Working Group update, DIF hosted a well attended community call to introduce the new Credential Schema work item - see write-up here

Coffee Breaks

Make sure to tune in to the recordings of May’s DIF Coffee Breaks.

Tim Boeckmann CEO and Co-founder of Mailchain
https://x.com/DecentralizedID/status/1787539546579902766
Nara Lau Founder at Fise Technologies
https://x.com/DecentralizedID/status/1791167095650254928
Ankur Banerjee CTO and Co-founder at Cheqd
https://x.com/DecentralizedID/status/1793702820883091752
Humpty Calderon, Advisor @Ontology and creator of Crypto Sapiens Podcast:
https://x.com/DecentralizedID/status/1795533701490855965

June’s Upcoming Coffee Breaks

June 20th at 1pm PDT/ 4pm EST
Andres Olave Head of Technology at Velocity Career Labs
https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1nAJEaLwvgbJL
June 27th at 11am PDT/ 8pm CET
Cole Davis Founder and CEO at Switchchord
https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1vAxRvwmorkxl

Follow https://twitter.com/DecentralizedID to get updates

🗓️ ️DIF Members

Guest blog: Markus Sabadello

Steering Committee member and Danube Tech CEO Markus Sabadello provides an overview of the Identifiers & Discovery Working Group, where he has been contributing as co-chair for many years.

https://blog.identity.foundation/an-overview-of-the-dif-identifiers-discovery-working-group/

New Member Orientations

If you are new to DIF join us for our upcoming new member orientations. Please subscribe to DIF’s eventbrite for upcoming notifications on orientations and events which can be found here.

🆔 Join DIF!

If you would like to get in touch with us or become a member of the DIF community, please visit our website.

Table of contents