Decentralized Identity Foundation News

The Korean SIG restarted fortnightly meetings. The initial focus of the group will be commercial use cases for wallet interoperability for cross-border retail. The SIG continues to be led by K4 Security's Kyounghul Park.
Hospitality and Travel SIG has two new leaders: Doug Rice and Gee Mann. The group will resume meeting around travel use cases.
IIW is coming up in November, with 3 adjacent events. In other words, it's an actual Identity Week spanning a full week. DIF is sponsoring IIW and Executive Director Grace Rachmany will be attending. If you plan to join and you are a DIF member, we have a 20% discount code. Just write to us for the code, or to set up a meeting with Grace while she's in the Bay Area.
Grace will be in the US for all of November and December, visiting San Francisco, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City (SEDI summit), and then New York, Philadelphia, and Washington DC. If you're in those areas and want to set up a meeting with Grace, please reach out to ed@identity.foundation
Delegated Authority is a complex issue. OG DIF Member Alan Karp's explains why you need to include delegation, despite the risks. Spoiler alert: people are going to delegate authority whether you allow it or not.

Universal Resolver

DIF's Universal Resolver service has been retired, and visitors to resolver.identity.foundation will now be taken to the page identity.foundation/uniresolver/, instead of being forwarded [automatically] to uniresolver.io, which still displays the "white-label" front-end included in the classic Universal Resolver reference implementation. This new page explains that formerly, DIF hosted a universal resolver, but no longer needs to since all the benefits of that sample deployment are better served by the free tiers of the many resolver services run by DIF members, such as GoDiddy.com (DanubeTech) and ThisDID.com (GoPlausible).

Working Group Updates

DIF Members are welcome to join and participate in any working group. Most working groups meet on a weekly basis, and the most active groups have task force meetings that focus on specific work items. All public meetings are recorded and you can find all of the information on our working groups here.

Creator Assertions Working Group

CAWG has experienced tremendous momentum, with several new members joining every meeting. To see the meeting summaries with new member introductions, see the CAWG Meeting summary page
The official decision has been made for CAWG to graduate from DIF into a separate entity, and to re-brand with a name that AI won't consistently misspell. This is an amicable agreement and we will be setting up CAWG for a successful graduation over the coming months. An official announcement will be forthcoming once all the details are worked out.
CAWG will be working on ensuring all of the donations to the GitHub repository are properly covered under open source IP agreements. We are asking everyone's cooperation as we ensure that the repository can be transferred with complete clarity about the IPR.
The Definitions Task Force will be presenting a draft for approval to the main WG.
The Trust Task Force is working on a governance-backed assertion using trust registries and the Trust Registry Query Protocol, but interest has grown in a CAWG certificate policy for X.509 certificates with specified behavior for S/MIME certificates.
The UX Task Force will be sharing with the broader WG and public a community-led conformance testing suite for CAWG assertions, modeled after the C2PA tool. A prototype of the suite of signing and embedding tools currently covers Identity, Metadata, and Training Data and Mining Assertions. The tools have already revealed minor inconsistencies in the specs, leading to a recent wave of PRs on those specifications (many merged this week). ProofMode Director of Reality Nathan Freitas also volunteered that their open source C2PA/CAWG verifier can also be used to proof manifest-embedded artefacts for people working on testing in the meantime.
The Trust Task Force will be discussing a sunset date for the Mozilla CA Certificate List and the S/MIME policy issues. Originally scheduled for the end of March 2027, it seems that a more realistic timeline would be August 2027, possibly with optional legacy support after that.
The VLEI Task Force has been evaluating the relevance of dossiers for their use case and on the challenges of timestamping and archiving in the context of ACDCs and CALs. Vasily reported on discussions with GLEIF about potentially archiving QBIs from out-of-business QVIs, noting that GLEIF saw it as feasible but needed internal review.

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Trusted AI Agents Working Group

The Delegated Authority has been iterating steadily for a month and adding last-minute chapters and sections in anticipation of an imminent v1.0 release-- consider this your last chance to open last-minute PRs big and small on the protocol evaluations report. If you haven't been following along, starting at the beginning would probably help contextualize the "payload" (the evaluations of each protocol family tree). In addition to its report, the task force has also been exerting direct influence on the W3C-CCG task force iterating the "ZCap" (AuthoriZation Capabilities) specification, the KYA-OS Task Force, and other groups further afield.

The KYA-OS working group has been baking an extension that would help KYA-OS Servers (mostly, but not exclusively, MCP Servers using the KYA-OS extension to better manage agentic traffic on the open web, that is) support one or more of the major agentic payment protocols hitting the market: UCP, A2P, etc. The form this takes, week in and week out, is ontological review comparing the "common basic data model" required for a "merchant" (loosely defined) server to field quotes or transactions and approve them: from there, a KYA-OS profile for safely moving into agentic commerce is on the horizon, and we're delighted to report it's already a collaborative effort, with various DIF members chipping into the research and review already.

DIF member Martin Riedel presented the delegated authorities reports at the Kuppinger Cole Impact Day for Agentic and Non-Human Identity in Munich on October 6, with ED Grace Rachmany presenting KYA-OS. Both also served on panel discussions about Agentic AI, accountability, and the difference between Agentic and workload identity.

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Hospitality and Travel Working Group

Discussions continued on the development of the HATPro standardized exchange schema for consumer preferences, working to create a modular "parts kit" approach that would allow users to build customized preference graphs.
Neil announced he would publish the first cut of the food preferences package on GitHub, emphasizing its role as a productized version of earlier work and a foundation for future discussions.
H&T discussed the potential of a potential DIF Labs track or DIF Hackathon around travel preferences.
H&T members were invited to present the HATpro schema at the Focusrite conference and explain the impoirtance of such schemas.
The group discussed the complexity of group travel use cases and the need for structured data exchange protocols. Alex expressed concern about the urgency of implementing HAT Pro technology amid rapid industry changes driven by AI.
The working group is working on marketing communications.
Douglas shared recent outreach efforts with Oracle's point-of-sale systems, Rosen Hotels and Resorts, and Marriott, while also discussing the potential for creating basic identity profiles that could be cloud-backed and permissioned.
Alex submitted a HATPro plugin to OpenAI, but it was rejected due to the issue of sharing data that could have medical implications, such as food allergies.
The group discussed the need to clarify what constitutes sensitive personal information and how to frame preferences, such as "things I must avoid," without triggering medical flags.

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DIDComm Working Group

The meeting focused on advancing CBOR binary encoding for DIDComm, specifically the use of CBOR as proposed in PR 463. The WG discussed the PR, which adds a first-byte indicator for CBOR encoding, and Colton presented his implementation in Rust that supports both JSON and CBOR, including mediator and client-side handling. The group reviewed the need for an implementation to move the PR forward and noted that Colton’s work provided that evidence, though a second independent implementation would be ideal. They discussed the logistics of merging the PR into the editor’s draft and releasing a version 2.2 to encourage additional implementations for cross-testing.

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DID Methods Working Group

The DID Methods Working Group had no new submissions for recommended methods. did:hedera is currently in the 60 day comment period.
During the October 7 meeting, Juan Caballero led a discussion on the W3C DID Methods Working Group, which will be coming up for a vote in the W3C TPAC meeting at the end of the month. Juan is DIF's official representative (as voted by the Steering Committee) to W3C. DIF has joined W3C for the purpose of leading this working group.
The DID Methods WG at W3C will differ in its criteria for recommendation. The group discussed how being a DID Recommended Method might reduce the amount of work for someone wanting to submit to the W3C WG, and DIF members discussed more rigorous requirements for the W3C WG.
The DID Methods WG discussed merging with the Identifiers & Credentials WG, and becoming a work item rather than a working group. The change needs to be proposed to the Steering Committee. The main complication would be if a DID method were proposed by someone who is not a DIF member. To date, that has not happened, so there are no technical blockers to this proposal.
Grace suggests the proposal be delayed until after the Steering Committee elections, as there has been some interest in co-chairing the DID Methods WG.

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Identifiers and Discovery Working Group

The I&D focused on updates and discussions around the DID WebVH and VH log specification. Stephen shared progress on drafting the VH log spec and the DID:VH spec, and discussed the possibility of registering VH as a DID method. The group reviewed recent developments, including a security assessment of the DID WebVHTS library and ongoing work on the TS library and Credo implementation. The conversation also covered the design of VH log, including its use of full state replacement, the role of watchers, and the need for pre-rotation to enhance security.

The Universal Resolver Task force results are discussed in DIF Updates above.

Link to registry.

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Applied Crypto Working Group

The Applied Crypto Working Group did not meet this month.

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Special Topics, Special Interest, and User Group Updates

Special Topic Calls: Secure Data Storage and Decentralized Web Nodes

Based on requests from a number of members to renew discussions on decentralized storage, DIF held three special topic calls in the last month. Currently, the discussions have been focused on the specific use cases, and identifying the needs for each of the proposed projects. New member Anton Tranellis shared some context on his use cases on October 9, and shared his own research on local-first-friendly data storage options with the group for further expansion and clarifications. The use case matrix is on the group's github repo and DIF members are welcome to participate asynchronously if they'd like to add or update rows to it.

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DIDComm User Group

The DIDComm Users Group meeting focused on Colton's presentation of the findings of his experimental implementation of CBOR encoded DIDComm, which aimed to reduce message size and bandwidth consumption compared to the current JSON implementation. Colton demonstrated that CBOR messages were significantly smaller, with non-encrypted auth-crypt messages showing an approximately 50% size reduction and plain text messages showing about 10% reduction over the wire.

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Korea Special Interest Group Group

Renewal of the Korea SIG started October 14. The group will be meeting on a fortnightly basis. In the first discussion, the group discussed interoperability between Korean and European identity wallets, and speculated on how to construct a use case that will be specific enough to yield a prototype within 6-12 months. The group is focused on retail and end-user wallets, rather than business wallets or digital product passports.

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📢 Upcoming Events

Internet Identity Workshop
📅 November 2-5, 2026
📍 Mountain View, California
Event Information
Free side events: VRM Day and miniKERICONF will take place November 2

Agentic Internet Workshop
📅 November 6, 2026
📍 Mountain View, California
Event Information

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) 127
📅 November 14-20, 2026
📍 San Francisco, California
Event Information

2026 SEDI Summit
📅 November 17-19, 2026
📍 Salt Lake City, Utah
Event Information

First ITU FG-TIDA
📅 November 30-December 1, 2026
📍 Paris, France
Event Information Announcement

2027 Identiverse
📅 June 28- July 1, 2027
📍 Las Vegas, Nevada
Event Information

👉Are you a DIF member with news to share? Email us at admin@identity.foundation with details.

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📲 Stay Connected with DIF

💡 New Member Orientations: If you are new to DIF, join us for our upcoming new member orientations. Find more information on DIF's Slack or contact us at membership@identity.foundation. Steering Committee Elections are around the corner. Any Associate or Contributing member can be nominated for a two-year term as a Steering Committee Member.