🚀 DIF Monthly #16 (March, 2021)

📯 With all the talk about vaccines and Covid Credentials, it's easy to miss our community's regularly scheduled programming. February may have flown right by many of us, so take a minute to catch up on the steady work everyone else was doing at DIF: Sidetree's specification reaches v1 🎉, a flurry of fascinating (and recorded) research presentations elucidated today's landscape and tomorrow's, at various layers of the stack, the standards landscape and beyond 🤓, and there is mounting momentum for at least two new DIF groups 💪

Table of contents

1. Group Updates; 2. Member Updates; 3. Funding; 4. DIF Media; 5. Community; 6. Jobs; 7. Metrics; 8. Join DIF

🚀 Foundation News

Sidetree Spec V1.0.0

Working Group approved status

• Sidetree is a protocol for creating scalable decentralized public key infrastructure (DPKI) networks that can run on top of any existing decentralized anchoring system (e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum, HL Fabric, QLDB) and be as open, public, and permissionless as the underlying anchoring systems they utilize. The protocol allows users to create globally unique, user-controlled identifiers and manage their associated metadata, all without the need for centralized authorities or trusted third parties.

Wallet Security WG kickoff and next steps

• There was a well-attended meeting to refine the charter Monday 1Mar at 6PM CET; there will be a follow-up at the same time the following week to continue the discussion.
• For information, register here and join the dedicated mailing list

Hospitality and Travel SIG proposal review

• Taking input a draft charter for a SIG looking at what industry-specific problems and power structures could gain from decentralized identity solutions for customer information and data flows.
• Registere for the meeting here - 10 am ET, 11th March

DIF Africa Discussion Group

• The group will connect companies, projects, and organizations involved in identity, credential, and trust technologies in the African economic zone.
• It will also drive the African regional participation in technical and professional organizations typically dominated by Europe and North America.
• Sign up for the mailing list
  and Register here for the Kick-off Call March 4th, 8 AM (GMT)

Migration to GHOST

• DIF staff decided to migrate its blog, newsletter, and other content-hosting capabilities to the open-source GHOST self-publishing platform. Over the coming weeks we'll be migrating our archive over from Medium and mailchimp, in the spirit of making our content more standards-conformant and portable. One bonus is that ghost uses markdown natively, bringing github and this newsletter into closer alignment!

🛠️ Group Updates

☂️ InterOp WG (cross-community)

• Layer1 Double Header: DID-Core update & Multi-proof (i.e. "multisig") VC representation precedents and approaches
  • Dan Burnett: DID-core presentation and ETH Entr. Alliance.
  • Markus: Potential multi-proof VC format representation issues
• Intro to "the Revocation Topic": first in a series, lead by Martin Riedel, who gave a very even-handed overview of pros and cons of the three main types of status-check mechanism, and gave examples of each.
  • Future sessions will cover proposed new mechanisms by DIF members, and some might even be led by guest-host Andreas Freitag, who is looking at how to evaluate them objectively against something like the DID-Rubric!
• More Layer 1 News: Updates on two recently registered DID Methods (DID:Orb and DID:Tezos), with a bonus discussion of how to design and specify and register future methods.
• VC Revocation Methods of the Future, a DEEEEP dive with Mike Lodder: Revocable BBS+, merkle magic, and various other futures covered here.

💡 Identifiers & Discovery

• Exploratory conversation about integrating/cross-interoperating ACA-py/Veramo/aries-framework-go and Universal Resolver, particularly at Layer 1-- will all four use the same DID-Method CRUD drivers some day?
  • DID write operations in Aries-framework-go, in Veramo, in Universal Registrar
  • Discussion around "trusted endpoints" for DID methods
• Discussion on DID CRUD operations, including architectures, interfaces, implementations (such as Universal Resolver/Registrar, ACA-py, aries-framework-go, Veramo, DIDKit)
  • Introduction to DIDKit
  • Discussion on architectures of DID registration software
  • Discussion around government-approved cryptography, and adoption of DIDs.
• Consider proof-of-control
• KERI WG charter finalized and approved by SC!
• Updates on Fuzzy Encryption project (C++ implementation released!)
• DID-Dillo project- lightweight in-browser DIDKit build for resolving DIDs locally with UR fallback. 300kb microbrowser can run on a flipphone!
• Helpful overview of DID Method registration process, multi-signature and verification method mechanics.
• Universal Registrar/Resolver & DIDComm: interesting work item afoot.
• DID-Core update: Daniel Burnett gave a report 3 weeks ago at Interop WG, and Markus will give a more recent one.

🛡️ Claims & Credentials

• Gabe Cohen had to step down from chairship, but will still be involved in specific work items. His colleague Daniel McGrogan has been nominated.
• Presentation Exchange is in final-final editorial, and ready for review!
• VC Marketplace is still accepting use-case proposals, get in touch if you're interested in their VC business-model/marketplace-use-case sandbox/discussion group!
• Credential Manifest still booting up and accepting initial PRs, not too late to get involved
• Poke around the new work item: Schema Forms.

🔓 DID Auth

• DIF-OIDF Joint Meetings.

🌱 Sidetree

• Sidetree v1.0.0
• Issue reviews and editorial PRs for Spec V1.
• ion v1.
• New Sidetree-based DID method: did:orb.

📻 DID Comm

• DID Registry DIDComm service types.

• DID Use Cases

  • Extended discussion
  • New PR:
  • New PR Preview

• DIDCom V2 Library - Rust (donated by Jolocom)

• Walkthrough and Q&A

  • Localization
  • Attachments

• PRs

  • 140
  • Major open PRs: 157 - JSON-LD Context
  • PRs merged or closed: DID-use-cases #messaging, Editorial PR 160
  • Issues discussed: 159 - Which keys are used for encryption, did-core 599

• Ongoing work items on sample implementation of DIDComm-rs & extension spec+implementation of DIDComm-bluetooth.

• Coming soon- extensions for the DID Spec registry... or... not?

📦 Secure Data Storage

• Replication Discussion.

⚙️ Product Managers

• A comprehensive, two-part discussion about key-management and UX ramifications of self-managed key material, control recovery versus account recovery, etc. led by Rouven Heck (ConsenSys/DIF)

🏥 Healthcare SIG

• Q&A session with Burak Serdar (Cloud Privacy Labs) and John Walker (Linux Foundation Public Health/Covid Credentials Initiative) about their work using OCA to build a FHIR-->LD-->multi-format VC translation engine at ToIP

📊 Finance & Banking SIG

• Guest presentation on AML
  • Next meeting is a working session

🦄 Member Updates

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

• Jolocom
  • Here’s a full, in-depth report from Jolocom covering INATBA’s recent roundtable event on “Digital Identity: What’s at Stake?”

💰 Funding

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:  30 June 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.

🎈 Community updates

DCMS Trust Framework - UK Govt.
The UK government has published its draft rules of the road for governing the future use of digital identities. The new trust framework lays out the draft rules of the road organisations should follow. It includes the principles, policies, procedures and standards governing the use of digital identity to allow for the sharing of information to check people’s identities or personal details, such as a user’s address or age, in a trusted and consistent way. This will enable interoperability and increase public confidence. The framework, once finalised, is expected to be brought into law.

DCMS are seeking feedback on the trust framework until 11 March, through a survey that is available on GOV.UK.

💼 Jobs

Members of the Decentralized Identity Foundation are looking for:

• Backend Engineers,
• Frontend Engineers,
• Head of Mobile Development... and many more!

Check out the available positions here.

🔢 Metrics

Medium: 1.3k followers | 3.696 minutes read
Twitter: 4.122t followers | 5.832 impressions | 1.623 profile visits
Website:16.448 unique visitors

In the last 30 days.

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