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Tag

Verifiable Credentials

Nov 15
Love0

Announcing Hyperledger AnonCreds: Open Source, Open Specification Privacy Preserving Verifiable Credentials

By Stephen Curran, Maintainer, Hyperledger AnonCreds Blog, Hyperledger AnonCreds, Identity

AnonCreds, the most commonly used Verifiable Credential (VC) format in the world*, is now a Hyperledger project. Ledger agnostic and with a formal open specification, AnonCreds continues to evolve as a mature verifiable credential format with unique privacy-protecting capabilities. As a Hyperledger project, AnonCreds will have support to grow its code base and community on a global level with technical governance that fosters best open development and security practices.

As the Internet transitions to allowing people, organizations, and things to have greater control over the sharing of their credentials, protecting privacy is of paramount concern.

Hyperledger AnonCreds—short for “Anonymous Credentials”—is a type of VC that adds important privacy-protecting ZKP (zero-knowledge proof) capabilities to the core VC assurances. A core element of the Hyperledger Indy project for more than five years, AnonCreds is a mature, complete model and interactions set, with extensive support across Hyperledger Aries frameworks.

The creation of this project signifies the continued healthy evolution of an open source software project that was once monolithic and is now a set of well-defined independent components. 

Hyperledger AnonCreds is ledger-agnostic and client-agnostic. It is not tied to Hyperledger Indy or Aries. This makes it usable with other verifiable data registries/ledgers and verifiable credential client stacks. As a result, important  privacy-protecting capabilities become available to a much broader audience, and the underlying cryptography can evolve without affecting the features above it.

Additional benefits of using Hyperledger AnonCreds include:

  • Avoidance of identifiers: No correlatable identifiers are required in presenting data to a verifier. Correlatable identifiers may be applied in a use case specific manner.
  • Verifier assurances: Credentials are bound to the holder, so verifiers know that credentials presented together were all issued to the holder providing the presentation.
  • Minimal data sharing: Data to be shared by a holder to a verifier is minimized through the use of selective disclosure and ZKP predicates

Flexible formatting: Credentials and presentations can be formatted in the W3C VC Data Model standard format.

AnonCreds has joined the Hyperledger ecosystem with over 25 sponsors. The project consists of:

  • The AnonCreds Specification, managed by the Hyperledger AnonCreds Specification Working Group and with the potential of being submitted to an appropriate Standards organization
  • Ledger/Verifiable Data Registry-agnostic, open source code implementations of the AnonCreds specification, suitable for use with Hyperledger Aries and non-Aries agents
  • Guidance for creating ledger-specific AnonCreds Methods to write and resolve AnonCreds objects for specific ledgers
  • Documentation on AnonCreds suitable for all audiences, from business audiences to cryptographers
  • A test suite to verify adherence to the AnonCreds specification and the interoperability of AnonCreds implementations.

Next steps include evolving the existing AnonCreds Rust implementation to be friendlier to VDRs/ledgers other than Indy, wrapping up the v1.0 specification, and gaining compliance with the W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model Standard.

If you’re interested in learning more about AnonCreds start with the Hyperledger AnonCreds project page. From there you can find how to join project discussions on Discord, add yourself to the project mailing list, find the AnonCreds repositories on GitHub, and join the AnonCreds Working Groups.

We welcome interest from all groups and organizations, including enterprises and standards organizations. We look forward to hearing from you!

*Source: godiddy.com combined “sov” (Indy) network volume

Sep 28
Love0

Get started with Hyperledger Aries: Accelerate your decentralized identity skills with a free instructor-led Workshop

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Aries, Identity

Hyperledger Aries is one of the fastest growing open source projects propelling the advancement and adoption of decentralized identity and verifiable credentials out there today. More companies than ever are deploying Aries-based agents that allow for trusted online peer-to-peer interactions.

Hyperledger Foundation has partnered with member company Indicio and its team of deeply experienced developers and architects to develop a free workshop to help developers and architects gain a deeper understanding of decentralized identity and become familiar with the technologies that are made possible by using Hyperledger Aries. 

This four-hour hands-on workshop provides beginner level opportunities to install and run the Hyperledger Aries components just like you would if you were making a real Aries-based application. Learn where to find the necessary Git repos and see how to use the Indy Command Line Interface (Indy CLI), and run the Aries toolbox to create and issue a verifiable credential.

This course also introduces some current projects using Hyperledger Aries to help you accelerate your understanding of decentralized identity and build the skills necessary to successfully make changes to the underlying code with hands-on guidance to develop your own projects.

About the Course

Build Your Identity Solution Using Hyperledger Aries
Thursday, November 10, 2022 
8 AM to noon Pacific
Register for free

This course, “Intro to Decentralized Identity,” is part of the Hyperledger Foundation Community Workshop series. It is a four hour online course that introduces the core concepts and principles of decentralized identity. As you progress, you’ll learn how to use a Hyperledger Indy-based network, be introduced to the Indy CLI, and install and run the Hyperledger Aries toolbox to create, issue, and verify a verifiable credential.

Topics also include:

  • Decentralized identity concepts and principles
  • The verifiable credential data model
  • Decentralized identity ecosystem
  • Introduction to network tools Indyscan and SelfServe
  • Intro to Indy CLI and how to use the CLI to access a network
  • What Aries is
  • Install and run the Aries Toolbox
  • Create connections and issue a credential
  • How to verify a credential

Participants are encouraged to review the course prerequisites, including the installation of docker, installation of Indy-CLI, and download of important repositories. Information on prerequisites can be found here.

This course is offered by the Hyperledger Foundation for free to expand the use, contributions, and maintainer community of Hyperledger Indy and Aries. A recording of the course will be made available at the conclusion of the instructor-led event.

Registration links and further information about the prerequisites and course materials can be found at https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/events/Build+Your+Identity+Solution+Using+Hyperledger+Aries 

Aug 23
Love1

Investing in Verifiable Credentials, Technical Interoperability and Open Source

By the Province of British Columbia, Office of the Chief Information Officer Blog, Hyperledger Aries, Identity

Our 20 Year Journey

Like many provinces and territories in Canada, British Columbia (BC) has a long history of providing secure access to online government services. We started our journey 20 years ago with the introduction of BCeID, a simple username and password solution. A lot has changed since then!

Today, we are investing in Verifiable Credentials (VCs) and a digital wallet. We see these as the cornerstones in the evolution of our digital strategy, adding a much needed layer of trust to the digital economy.  

We want to share what we are doing, why we focus on interoperability and open-source, and why we are excited about VCs being our natural next step.

Why We Care

As a public sector organization, BC has a strong interest in seeing the adoption of technologies that are secure, privacy-preserving, and convenient.  

Digital is obviously everywhere. In 2021, 94% of BC citizens said they are online, and 90% of Canadians have smartphones. Also, according to the Business Council of Canada, in the last decade Canada’s digital economy grew 40% faster than the overall world economy.  In Digital ID terms, this growth is an opportunity to make people’s online lives easier and safer.

We also know that cybersecurity threats are growing and there are no signs of it slowing down. BC sees an astonishing 496 million unauthorized access attempts per day – that’s 5,741 every second! Identity theft and fraud also continues to rise. We need digital trust solutions that counter this increasing risk.

In responding to this new reality, we recognize that people are familiar and comfortable with the many credentials that governments issue today. Things like physical copies of drivers’ licenses, health cards, passports, permits, and reports are widely accepted and trusted.  In BC, we are building on that trust and moving towards providing the same things digitally. We are also enabling confidential connections through the wallet to give people choice and confidence in their digital lives.  

BC’s Approach 

Clearly, digital trust goes far beyond just the government. Canadians expect more access, with greater security, to high-value services in both the public and private sectors. VCs and the wallet provide a highly flexible way to achieve that goal.

Collaboration is critical to achieving that goal and it’s important to us. BC’s Chief Information Officer, CJ Ritchie, strongly advocates for us working together to meet the expectations of Canadians.  She notes, “If we don’t all act together to deliver solutions that protect privacy and interact securely, trust will erode and there will be negative impacts for businesses, people’s livelihoods, and the broader digital economy.”

As our approach evolves, we also remain keen to support open source solutions that interoperate with other national and international efforts. There is no dominant design yet, no one network or technology, so we must remain nimble and flexible in our exploration. We also need to coexist with existing identity solutions that millions of British Columbians already rely upon.

Technology Interoperability

In exploring VCs, BC is contributing to solutions that allow agents to verify credentials from multiple networks. Indeed, through one of our Code With Us initiatives, DID indy, we contributed over 11,000 lines of open-source code to support and prove the viability of a “network of networks”.

We also are focused on the interoperability of Hyperledger Aries agents themselves, another key success metric.  We are leading contributors to Aries Agent Test Harness (AATH), open-source software that runs a series of Hyperledger Aries interoperability tests and delivers the results to the AATH website. Great interoperability requires that we test—and re-test!—that interoperability on a regular basis.

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Side note: If you want to test the interoperability of any Aries agent with this ecosystem, please sign up to join the Hyperledger Aries Interoperability Event on August  31.

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Driving Adoption

In BC we have a lot of technical skill in working with VCs and with Hyperledger Aries agents. However, for VCs to be successful, it needs to be easy for others to join in. 

On the agents side, to complement our extensive contributions to Hyperledger Aries Cloud Agent Python (ACA-Py) and other Aries and Indy projects, we also contribute to Hyperledger Aries Framework Javascript (AFJ), the agent commonly used for mobile digital wallets. 

That’s why, when thinking about mobile digital wallets, we opted to contribute to the Hyperledger Aries Bifold project, helping it also essentially become “Bifold as a framework”. Bifold uses AFJ, and BC and others can use it to easily deploy a custom-designed digital wallet. Jurisdictions within Canada and elsewhere in the world are already taking this approach for their own wallet explorations. It’s an open-source stack right the way down.

VC adoption will be helped by a thriving open-source community, and we are giving back wherever we can.

Open-Source Success

We believe the community’s success becomes our success. For years we’ve been committed to open-source, interoperable solutions in this space. Our approach is always evolving, but our contributions and commitment to various digital trust open-source projects and technologies continue.

We hope that even more organizations will join in and contribute. Our goal in BC is a new layer of trust for the internet, making it easier for people to work and play online with confidence. 

Copyright © 2022 The Linux Foundation®. All rights reserved. Hyperledger Foundation, Hyperledger, and the other Hyperledger Foundation trademarks are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. For a list of Hyperledger Foundation trademarks, please see our Trademark Usage page. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

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