XDI TC Unofficial Telecon Notes: Monday 2017-02-19

["=Drummond Reed" <drummond.reed@evernym.com>]

XDI TC Notes

Following are the notes of the unofficial telecon of the XDI TC held on:

Date: Monday, 19 February 2018 USA
Time: 9:00AM - 10:00AM Pacific Time (16:00-17:00 UTC)

The TC operates under a standing rule approved 17 July 2008 under which the TC does not hold regular official meetings and conducts all business by electronic ballot only. Unofficial weekly meetings are held to enable discussion among members but no business is conducted nor actions taken.

ATTENDING

Drummond Reed
Markus Sabadello
Phil Windley
Joseph Boyle

NOTES

ERC 725 as a Ethereum Identity Standard

Markus said he met with Fabian Vogelsteller, the primary author of a new ERC for decentralized identity using Ethereum smart contracts.

Both Markus and Phil noted that they are surprised at the lack of awareness among developers about JSON-LD.

Update on DID Spec Architecture

Drummond and Markus will provide a further update on the progress of the review of the DID (Decentralized Identifier) spec the W3C Credentials Community Group, including open issues of special interest to the XDI TC.

Drummond and Markus reviewed the revised ABNF in the DID Spec Completion Proposals document that Markus is now implementing the DIF (Decentralized Identity Foundation) Universal Resolver. Markus gave a short demo of his work-in-progress.

Use of DIDs and DID Documents in XDI

The rapidly evolving DID infrastructure can be leveraged for discovery purposes in an XDI data sharing and messaging network. Let's continue to discuss about how DIDs and DID Documents enable XDI Discovery, with the following sub-topics:

1. Mapping DIDs to XDI addresses, and mapping DID Documents to XDI graphs

2. XDI Discovery on top of DID Universal Resolver

3. Global XDI addressability of all data available as DID Documents

Drummond noted that the revised DID ABNF will enable XDI addresses—with the appropriate escape encoding—to be passed in DID service URLs. This would allow XDI addressing via a DID resolver, such as the DIF Universal Resolver, just like it would be allowed via an HTTP proxy.

XDI Discovery would work the same way with DID service URLs as it would work with HTTP proxy URLs (or any other mechanism for finding a starting address).

Sovrin Protocol and XDI

Multiple new protocols are emerging in the decentralized identity space (Sovrin Protocol, DIF Hubs, Credential Repository Service, Solid, etc.) Let's discuss the relationship between those efforts and XDI.

Markus observed that all of them involve overlapping concepts, with different priorities and focii.

• DIF hubs are more about data storage.

• Sovrin is more about verifiable claim exchange.

• CRS is more about claims access and exchange.

• Solid is more like the Web—it’s Linked Data on the Web, with support for capabilities. A globally connected Web of RDF resources.

All of these have overlap with each other. DIF hubs are using JSON-LD to describe storage.

We discussed how each would do messaging between the DID-identified endpoints (what Sovrin calls “agents”).

• With Solid you can do a basic inbox of messages, but that’s the extent.

• CRS does not currently involve messaging.

• DIF hubs have a concept of messaging, but it is secondary to the storage aspect. It is an extension.

• Sovrin has an agent messaging protocol for use between Sovrin agents identified by DIDs. It supports two message primitives: anoncrypt and authcrypt.

Drummond shared the general thought that most these protocols are building agent-to-agent messaging from the “bottom up”—from the needs to create a secure channel to share data and exchange verifiable claims to establish trust—whereas XDI was developed from the “top down” as a generalized semantic data interchange protocol. The “sweet spot” is where they will meet in the middle and agents will start needing generalized semantic messaging to deliver on their core value propositions.

We agreed this is a topic we need to continue to discuss over the coming year.

NEXT REGULAR CALL

The next call will be next week at the usual time (Monday 9AM PT). The link where agenda items can be posted for the next meeting is: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19oDl0lbb56Grehx2a5flZnhrgnua5l8cVvC_dJ8fTXk/edit?usp=sharing