In my previous posts, I highlighted the Job-Creds POC — a self-sovereign identity (SSI) collaboration between Evernym, IBM, and others, and most recently introduced Evernym’s Accelerator program. In this article, I’m excited to introduce an expanded partnership with IBM, with the sole goal of propelling early adopters of decentralized identity from proof-of-concept to pilot.

So how did we get here? If you’ve been fortunate enough to attend one of Gartner’s recent IAM or security-related events, you might have seen Job-Creds cited as one of the leading and most exciting examples of SSI-done-right, along with their increasingly bullish predictions on the impact of decentralized identity on the world.

At Evernym, we’re experiencing the increasing SSI drumbeat firsthand: just six months after launch, we now have 25 organizations in our first-of-its-kind Accelerator program, and we’re seeing an amazing diversity of interest from banks and governments to telcos, NGOs, and universities. It’s a testament to the strategic significance of the technology that, in many instances, membership comes with direct C-Suite sponsorship. Like us, forward-thinking CEO’s believe that SSI will change everything.

While our Accelerator program is proving to be fertile ground for getting hands-on with Evernym’s suite of SSI products and as a base from which to evaluate the opportunities at hand, we’re increasingly working with organizations for whom proof point milestones have already been met. Our partner CULedger, for example, has already moved from POC to pilot stage, and together we have eyes on the widespread production roll-out of MyCUiD.

CULedger isn’t alone — ambitious teams like those at Truu, ATB Financial, and the Province of Ontario, are actively building out pilots or aiming to go straight into early production. In fact, British Columbia is already live, contributing to Hyperledger Indy and leveraging Sovrin for their revolutionary VON offering. 2019 truly is the year that self-sovereign identity will step into the limelight.

Re-enter IBM, who we’ve been collaborating with since mid-2017 and who has become one of our most trusted allies in the mission to right today’s digital identity woes. As one of the most trusted names in technology for many decades, their early support of Sovrin was a game-changer, and they have been wonderful ambassadors for self-sovereign identity amongst the traditionally change-averse Enterprise crowd.

With that in mind, it gives me great pleasure to introduce an expanded 2019 partnership between Evernym and IBM, as well as a new joint offering.

The offering combines Evernym’s unique expertise and decentralized identity-enabling product suite, with IBM’s size, scale, and years of experience supporting enterprise technology deployment.

High-level benefits of the offering will include:

• In-person collaboration with similar organizations aided by IBM Design Thinking practitioners to explore use-cases related to decentralized identity
• Expert guidance from Evernym subject matter experts on technical, business, and policy considerations
• Access to Evernym’s product suite, Verity, included with admission to Evernym’s Accelerator Program and with access to continued education, training, and networking with other members
• Hands-on help moving from concept to pilot to production with the help of IBM Blockchain Labs

For organizations looking for a fast-track to the benefits SSI can provide at production scale, we believe the combination of IBM and Evernym products and services represents an exciting opportunity to work with two pioneers in the field.

For more information on our respective programs, please see the below websites, and do get in touch if you’d like to learn more about how we can help you.

• Join the Evernym SSI Accelerator
• Blockchain Trusted Identity Networks - IBM Blockchain

Founded in 2013, Evernym helps organizations implement self-sovereign identity, and individuals to manage and utilize their self-sovereign identity. Learn more at evernym.com.

Evernym and IBM team up to accelerate adoption of Self-Sovereign identity was originally published in Evernym on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Co-authored by Jason Law

We all know that identity matters. We hear about cybersecurity breaches, GDPR, refugees, deep fakes, and election fraud. Each headline highlights a new way that identity impacts us.

Yet we may be accepting naive assertions about what identity actually means. Some equate identity with authentication. Others map it to accounts and credentials. Still others think of it as a personal data and metadata issue. Such mindsets may feel reasonable, but each simplifies too much. Identity manifests in several dimensions. Identity solutions must model all of these dimensions to be complete.

Identity as Relationships: Perspective Matters

One dimension of identity is the relationships that give it context. We share ourselves differently in different relationships. Coworkers see us in one way, family members, doctors, and governments in others. Social networks prove that the relationship dimension of identity matters.

Many identity solutions collapse all versions of “you” to a single construct. In LDAP, for example, each user has a unique but universal identifier. The user in an email group and the user that participates in an HR reporting relationship are the same user. When you use login with Facebook or Google, this same consolidation of “you” repeats on the web.

This may feel convenient, but it raises privacy concerns. If everyone identifies you the same way, then they can share information about you. Unchecked, correlation and surveillance become scary. Regimes could hunt political dissidents, cyberbullying could become inescapable, and privacy could vanish. This is one reason why Sovrin — a new global utility for self-sovereign identity — is so fanatical about partitioning all the shards of “you” so carefully.

Identity as Attributes: Facts Abound

Another dimension of identity is information about us. We share our data in obvious ways, through a driver’s license or medical chart, for instance. But our identities also leak more subtly. The gamer who customizes the appearance of an avatar is sharing personal preferences. The Facebook quiz about how many ’80s pop songs we remember leaks demographics. Marketers track thousands of these overt details.

Identity without this factual dimension has limited use. Banks need facts to lend us money. Doctors need our medical history and current medications to optimize our care.

This highlights an interaction between the relationship and data (attributes) dimensions of identity. We don’t mind telling a doctor about our elective surgery — we just don’t want our friend at the PTA to know it. GDPR’s purpose limitation principle requires such granular control. This challenges the business models of many internet giants. (A future post will explore how giving users such control can be a win-win.)

Identity as Agents: Work is Delegated

A third dimension of identity is the agents that represent us. When we text our friends, we use a phone to capture and relay our words, and our friends perceive us through similar technologies. Our phone acts as our agent. Almost all digital interactions use agents. Humans can’t directly transmit bytes, decrypt with private keys, and so forth.

Agents can also be people — lawyers or realtors, for example — who act as our fiduciaries.

To have a trustworthy identity, we must have trustworthy agents. We expect lawyers to keep our confidences, and even enforce such behavior. Unfortunately, identity tech is rife with flaws in this regard.

Some flaws are policy-based. When Facebook bought WhatsApp, it said it wouldn’t optimize ads with chat content. A year later, it backtracked, leaving a billion users with a Hobson’s choice on privacy.

Other flaws are conceptual. Most cybercrime hinges on an act of impersonation by a nefarious actor. If agents are the attack vector, a protection is to give them distinct keys from their masters. This is a well-understood principle in the tangible world. Lawyers who represent us don’t forge our signature on documents. Yet we see identity systems where a trusted third party holds the identity owner’s keys…

Planes

Any two of these dimensions of identity form a plane. It is in these planes that identity questions begin to find powerful answers.

The Relationship ~ Attribute plane is where we answer the question: Who knows what about me?

Some models oversimplify relationships. They answer this question in just one way: everybody knows the same “you.”

Some models oversimplify attributes. They make sharing an all-or-nothing decision.

If both dimensions of identity are granular, you can make powerful, privacy-preserving choices. Suppose you have an employment credential with your name, role/title, and salary. You could choose to share only name and salary when you apply for a loan:

To maximize privacy, you must share attributes in an unlinkable way. Hyperledger Indy (and Sovrin, built atop it) makes this possible. It proves the origin of data in a digital credential without sharing the signature. Other technologies ignore this requirement and incur big disadvantages as a result. (Even with Indy, you can disclose a strong correlator, like first and last name. The mistake of less powerful models is in not making disclosure optional.)

The Relationship ~ Agent plane is where we answer the question: Which proxy represents me in which contexts, and how?

This matters in the tangible world. We let realtors represent us when buying a house, but we don’t let them decide whether to take us off life support. Legal and political events hinge on such questions. Were political operatives acting as Nixon’s agents when they burglarized Watergate? Was the software behind the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures working for North Korea?

Yet we sometimes see identity models that collapse this plane. They simplify by assuming that an agent in one relationship is an agent in all. Or they simplify by assuming that a relationship is serviceable by all agents. This is not good enough. Should my laptop, but not my phone, be authoritative when transferring more than $1,000 USD? Do I want my cloud agent to store and forward messages, but not to read them or to sign on my behalf?

The best answers involve careful, granular choices about key management. Moving keys to the edge is an important default. It improves security over centralized systems that trust a third party. However, this principle demands smarter agents and is often ignored.

The Agent ~ Attribute plane is perhaps the least familiar. It answers the question: Which proxy can share what about me?

This plane is where you choose which agents know what about you. It is also where you authorize agents to re-share what they know. You may not want to wrestle details — and with carefully designed user experience, you may not need to. Nonetheless, an identity model that supports choices here has huge benefits.

Suppose Fred, a PhD chemist, is looking for work. He approaches two recruiting firms about helping him with a placement. One specializes in academia; the other, in industrial research. Fred crafts one resume that emphasizes his publications and lecture experience, and another that focuses on his patents and inventive innovations. In doing so, he is making choices in the Agent ~ Attribute plane, since one agent can share different attributes of his identity than the other.

Identity models often neglect this plane. In doing so, they may miss requirements in regulation, cybersecurity, and user experience. Maybe your desktop gets IT attention, runs backup software, and unlocks by fingerprint. In contrast, you might misplace your phone on a restaurant counter or the back seat of a taxi on any given day. Do these two agents have the same security and auditing standards — or should their cryptocurrency wallets vary? Would you like to say that your phone can only spend small amounts of money, while your desktop has no limit? This plane lets a user limit mischief when a phone goes missing or a cloud service gets hacked.

Beyond Planes — Into 3-Dimensions

Planes are not the end of the story. We can model decision points anywhere in 3-dimensional space. That may sound esoteric, but it matches choices we make every day. We use an iPad and a workstation and a phone for a mixture of personal and professional work. We put different credentials and personal data on each. We configure them to share different things about us. These are 3-dimensional identity decisions.

Of course, complex decisions are not a selling point for users. Mishandled by software, they can be an annoyance, a burden, and a security problem. But the solution is not to design systems that ignore the complexity. This shifts the problem to users without any tools or guidance. Rather, we should model identity in its full richness. Then we should automate away what’s unhelpful in a given context. Only then will we have an identity that’s intuitive, flexible, and robust.

Founded in 2013, Evernym helps organizations implement self-sovereign identity, and individuals to manage and utilize their self-sovereign identity. Learn more at evernym.com.

Three Dimensions of Identity was originally published in Evernym on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In a previous post, I talked about the process of taking new technology out of the labs and into production, crossing the chasm so to speak. I addressed two of the most common questions Evernym is asked: When and How should I investigate self-sovereign identity (SSI)? With the announcement of the Job-Creds proof-of-concept (POC), we demonstrated that forward-looking organizations like ATB Financial, IBM, the Sovrin Foundation and Workday are hard at work proving out SSI, and carving a path to production.

These teams are not alone; we’ve run dozens of ‘classic’ POCs, mostly for smart innovation teams within large organizations. We’re grateful for these projects, which have provided insight and perspective about how to evolve the market. We’ve learned how innovation teams think about SSI, how they prove to their wider organizations that the technology works, and how to develop our software and messaging in such a way that it allows them to do just that.

The Job-Creds POC was important in raising the bar for how SSI is perceived. For the first time, multiple parties came together armed with the same software, the same training, and an agreement to explore technology together in search of a solution to a specific use case. Significantly, it confirmed our hunch that if the right environment was created, something magical could happen — the SSI story could start to take on a life of its own. Once the participating organizations were able to issue and verify digital credentials, and when our protagonist ‘Alice’ was able to hold her own digital credentials, extensions and improvements to the original user stories became straightforward. For example, what if, after Alice had opened a new bank account using her digital driving license and digital proof of employment, she could receive a credential containing her bank account details and seamlessly use it to update her employer’s payroll system? Although this wasn’t the original use case, it was simple to add, and this detail improved the customer experience while solving a real business problem.

During the project, it became clear that the value of the whole was not limited by the sum of the initial parts. In fact, an ecosystem had been created that could easily be improved and expanded; adding more participants would increase the potential to extend Alice’s digital existence.

It was further proof that we are on the right track with the Accelerator program.

How to boil an ocean, aka building a “Field of Dreams”

As blockchain markets yearn for evidence to justify the hype, one result of our mostly private POCs has been testing the Sovrin Network, and demonstrating objectively and within minutes that the technology really works. Continuing to focus on individual organizations and one-off POCs would be to risk going beyond a point of diminishing returns.

The Accelerator program is the distillation of the experiences and learnings we’ve gained over the years, coupled with the realization that we’re uniquely placed to offer such a program. Participants are provided with the same SSI-enabling software, the same access to expertise and training, and most importantly—access to a curated community of like-minded organizations with whom they can collaborate. Many of the barriers associated with learning individually, or running multi-party projects, are torn down; this affords participants the time to focus on which business problems they want to solve, and how they can do just that.

In soft launch, we’re supporting around 15 market-leading organizations, including provincial governments, an airline group, several banks, one of the world’s largest humanitarian institutions, a telco, a background screening company, a huge Swiss pharmaceutical company, and several brilliant startups. As the list grows, so does the value of the playing field these teams are able to play in, and when Alice visits this new virtual ecosystem, her digital journey will be very rich indeed. If the early evidence is anything to go by, we’re expecting a step change in the volume of public, transformative use cases that will be hitting the market soon.

“The Accelerator program has given us some very clear first steps to explore self-sovereign identity, and to connect with other organizations to build a trial ecosystem. By showing how it really works, and with experts on hand, we are able to learn quickly and develop real solutions that directly benefit our customers, partners and the wider business.”

— David Harney, CEO, Irish Life

I’ve explained to people previously that we see the Accelerator program as a hybrid of Khan Academy, a hackathon, and an MBA program; in other words, guided tuition, the tools and support to build groundbreaking technology solutions, and a network of peers to work with. The reality of course, is that we hope to continually exceed the expectations of our customers and that the program will evolve and grow to be what the members want it to be — and what the market needs it to be.

The promise of truly self-sovereign identity seems so much closer than it did even six months ago, and we’re so excited to work with more people and more teams, and to see where we can take this, together.

The Enterprise POC is dead. Long live ecosystems, long live the Accelerator program!

Founded in 2013, Evernym helps organizations implement self-sovereign identity, and individuals to manage and utilize their self-sovereign identity. Learn more at evernym.com.

Identity is evolving—time for POCs to do the same was originally published in Evernym on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here are seven myths of SSI that I repeatedly hear and will address across two posts. Myths 1–3 will be discussed here, myths 4–7 here.

1. Self-sovereign means self-attested.
2. SSI attempts to reduce government’s power over an identity owner.
3. SSI creates a national or “universal ID” credential.
4. SSI gives absolute control over identity.
5. There’s a “main” issuer of credentials.
6. There’s a built-in method of authenticating.
7. User-centric identity is the same as SSI.

Note: readers should have a basic understanding of how SSI works before reading this. For a primer, review the third and final section of The Three Models of Digital Identity Relationships.

Background

I recently attended the ID2020 event in New York, where some of the biggest players in identity were on hand, working toward fulfilling the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 16.9: Identity for all by 2030. It was an excellent event, lots of energy, very professional, and serious about moving the needle on this BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal).

We heard first-hand examples of the pains caused by broken identity systems around the world, some of which were truly heartbreaking. Most of us take for granted that we can prove things about ourselves, unaware that over a billion people cannot, leaving them unable to obtain desirable work or advanced education, open a bank account, hold title to property, or even travel. As noted by the World Bank’s ID4D, identity is a prerequisite to financial inclusion, and financial inclusion is a big part of solving poverty.

That means improving identity will reduce poverty, not to mention what it could do for human trafficking. Refugees bring another troubling identity dilemma where the need is critical, and where we are commencing efforts through our partnership with iRespond.

The Culprit

Several times throughout the event, SSI was discussed as a new and potentially big part of the solution. While there was clearly hope, there was also skepticism that, in my opinion, stems from misperceptions about what SSI really is and is not.

If SSI really was what these skeptics thought, I wouldn’t favor it either. And if they knew what SSI really is, I think they’d embrace it wholeheartedly.

The perception problem begins with the very term, “self-sovereign.”

At one point on the main stage, the venerable Kim Cameron, Microsoft’s Principal Identity Architect and author of the seminal 7 Laws of Identity, quipped:

“The term ‘self-sovereign’ identity makes me think of hillbillies on a survivalist kick.”

Kim went on to clarify that he is strongly in favor of SSI, he just dislikes the term and the negative perceptions it conjures up.

Me, too.

Self-sovereign identity is not a great term — for lots of reasons — but until we have a better one, (“decentralized identity” is a serious candidate) let’s clarify the one we’ve got.

Myth 1: Self-sovereign means self-attested.

Third-Party Credentials

In meatspace (real life, compared with cyberspace), to prove something about yourself you must present what others say about you in the form of credentials or other evidence; without this, what you claim about yourself isn’t strongly reliable.

I can claim I went to Harvard, but when a prospective employer needs to know for sure, my claim is no longer sufficient. Saying my credit is great won’t get me a loan, and claiming I’m a pilot won’t get me into the cockpit. I need proof, and it must come from a source that the relying party will trust.

SSI is no different. You can make all the claims you want about yourself, but when a relying party needs to know for sure, you need to show them credentials provably issued by a source the relying party trusts.

Self-Attested Credentials

Self-attested verifiable credentials — what you say about yourself — still have their place: they are how you provide your opinion, preference, and most important, consent¹. Opinion, preference, and consent can only reliably come from the identity owner and not from third parties, whereas proof of identity or other attributes are exactly the opposite: they must come from third parties and not the identity owner.

So, to prove Timothy Ruff has given his consent — which only Timothy can give — you must be confident that you’re dealing with the real Timothy Ruff, which is only provable with third-party attestations.

This means that self-attested credentials, including consent, still rely indirectly on third-party credentials. (Unless it’s something like pizza preferences, where who you are doesn’t matter much.)

Bottom line: the foundation of SSI, as with any strong identity system, is third-party issued credentials, not self-attested credentials. SSI supports both, and each type can add value to the other.

Myth 2: SSI attempts to reduce government’s power over an identity owner.

This myth hearkens back to Kim’s comment, where the term “self-sovereign” could literally be interpreted to mean an individual might somehow become less subject to government. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, SSI can actually build a stronger and richer relationship between governments and citizens.

SSI makes possible a private, encrypted, peer-to-peer connection between government and each citizen that can, with mutual consent, be used for powerful mutual authentication (preventing phishing), communication, data sharing, and more. This connection wouldn’t be affected by changes in email address, postal address, phone numbers, and so on. And since both sides of the link would be self-sovereign, either side could terminate it, too.

From the perspective of government, the initial function of SSI is straightforward: take existing credentials, whether physical or digital, and begin issuing them cryptographically secure in the form of digital, verifiable credentials. These credentials can then be held independently by the individual, and verified instantly by anyone, anywhere, including government, when presented.

The secondary function of SSI is even more interesting: use the encrypted connection that was created during credential issuance for direct, private, ongoing interaction with the constituent.

From the perspective of the individual, we’ve actually had some central features of SSI for hundreds of years, using the global standard known as paper. Today, government gives you a passport which you carry and present anywhere you wish, with broad acceptance. SSI simply makes the same thing possible digitally, and with significant advantages (zero-knowledge proofs/selective disclosure, revocation, mutual authentication, etc.).

This digital transformation of credentials simply hasn’t been possible until now, at least interoperably and on a global scale.

Myth 3: SSI creates a national or “universal ID” credential.

There exists no intention (or delusion) that I am aware of that somehow SSI can, once it is broadly adopted, supplant a national ID system. On the contrary, as mentioned above, government should get excited about how SSI can complement and improve existing identity systems, whether national, regional, or otherwise.

SSI actually does not replace the trust of government or any other organization; it is simply a means for connecting and exchanging instantly authenticatable data. SSI is set of protocols, not an actor, and it has no inherent basis for trust other than the cryptographic properties that ensure the privacy and integrity of the data exchanged and the connection used to exchange it. What parties exchange over that connection, and whether to trust what was exchanged, is up to them.

Some governments already understand SSI and are leading out on its implementation. My prediction: all governments will eventually use SSI to issue credentials digitally, to better communicate with and interact with constituents, to streamline internal processes where slow verification bogs things down, to more strongly authenticate the people, organizations, and things they deal with, and to reduce the printing of paper and plastic.

SSI in the Developing World

Now that’s all fine and dandy for the developed world… but what about the billion-plus “invisibles” living without credentials, often in situations where a government is somehow struggling to issue them… can SSI help?

Quite possibly.

In some parts of the world, trust within a community is established by obtaining from a trusted individual a signed attestation that you’re worthy of obtaining a loan, for example. With SSI this could be done digitally rather than on paper, it could involve biometrics that strongly attach the attestation to the attestee and attestor, and it could include attestations and other potential credit scoring data from multiple sources.

I can imagine a baby born in a remote village and receiving her first “credentials” from her family and friends, who each give her attestations about her birth and their recollections of it. Pictures, videos, songs, and other precious memories could be added to her brand new digital wallet — which is now so much more than a wallet — and with guardianship of it tied to her parents. Who knows how such a set of credentials issued by loved ones might later be used, but my sense is that it could be vitally important some day.

I love the fact that SSI is powerful for both developed and developing worlds. I can’t wait to explore this topic more in the future.

Part 2, Myths 4–7, can be read here.

Footnotes:

¹ Consent is a rich topic that will be covered in greater detail in the future. See here for an eye-opening perspective about how elusive, and practically impossible in many cases, consent can be.

Founded in 2013, Evernym helps organizations implement self-sovereign identity, and individuals to manage and utilize their self-sovereign identity. Learn more at evernym.com.

7 Myths of Self-Sovereign Identity was originally published in Evernym on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here are seven myths of SSI that I repeatedly hear and will address across two posts. Myths 1–3 were discussed here, myths 4–7 will be discussed in this post.

1. Self-sovereign means self-attested.
2. SSI attempts to reduce government’s power over an identity owner.
3. SSI creates a national or “universal ID” credential.
4. SSI gives absolute control over identity.
5. There’s a “main” issuer of credentials.
6. There’s a built-in method of authenticating.
7. User-centric identity is the same as SSI.

Note: readers should have a basic understanding of how SSI works before reading this. For a primer, review the third and final section of The Three Models of Digital Identity Relationships.

Myth 4: SSI gives absolute control over identity.

SSI gives its owner sovereign control over some aspects of identity, but not all. The digital wallet, DIDs, interaction history, consent receipts, private keys, and self-attested credentials are all self-sovereign, and can only be taken away with consent of the owner.

However… connections, relationships, and third-party issued credentials are not entirely self-sovereign, nor should they be. They represent (at least) two-sided relationships, and the other party to the relationship has some degree of control, too.

For example, if Abbott and Costello form a peer-to-peer SSI relationship and then subsequently break up, either Abbott or Costello can terminate the digital relationship — it’s not completely sovereign for either of them. As long as they both opt to keep it, the digital connection remains.

For third-party credentials, it is more nuanced. I recognize that some implementations of SSI do not allow for revocation, and that some people believe that credentials, once issued, should not be revocable, they should simply expire and be re-issued. We feel strongly that revocation is an essential component of credentialing in general — even if only to undo a mistaken issuance — and have implemented our thinking into Sovrin.

In the real world, I carry around my driver’s license and insurance card. If I drive drunk or neglect my premiums, these credentials can be revoked, but I still possess the plastic cards and can still use them to prove my age or address. Issuers don’t usually track someone down to confiscate the physical artifact after revoking it. (I recognize that this may not be true in some countries.)

Sovrin-style SSI makes this same balance possible with digital credentials, and usable in both meatspace and cyberspace: digital credentials such as licenses, permits, and the like can be held by the SSI owner in a self-sovereign digital wallet, and can still be revoked by their issuers, without the credentials themselves being removed from the wallet, and without verifiers needing to “phone home” (see below).

Importantly, revocation is optional, as it’s up to each issuer to build in the revocation ability during the issuance process. Without revocation, if the wrong Timothy Ruff undeservedly receives a Harvard diploma as a result of a clerical error, there would be no recourse other than asking the unintended recipient to destroy it or waiting for it to expire. (Good thing I’m honest.)

An Identity Game-Changer: Solving the “Phone Home” Problem

One very important (and exciting!) capability of Sovrin-style SSI credential revocation that’s not possible in the physical world: the ability of a verifier to instantly determine whether a presented credential has been revoked without contacting the issuer.

In the real world, physical credentials (e.g. a driver’s license) can be instantly checked for revocation against the issuer’s database. This introduces a problem, however, called the “phone home” problem: for every verifier of drivers licenses to have access to the official database from every state and every country, it would require a large, messy, many-to-many architecture, which introduces undesirable security, privacy, interoperability, and other complications, which is why it doesn’t happen often.

With Sovrin-style revocation, issuers can update anonymous revocation registries stored on the public ledger as often as every few minutes, where the updates become instantly available to verifiers anywhere¹. Doing this in a privacy-preserving manner is an important technological breakthrough that we have open-sourced and made freely available in the Hyperledger Indy codebase, implemented and running on the Sovrin network.

Revocation is an important topic that will be treated more fully in upcoming papers.

Myth 5: There’s a “main” verifier of credentials.

I am often asked how identity is verified with SSI. The presumption seems to be that SSI has some designated actor or intermediary who does the authenticating, which conflates the IDP model of identity with SSI.

With true SSI there is no designated actor in the middle who verifies identities. Identity proofing services can provide a valuable service, but when government and financial institutions begin issuing verifiable credentials directly to identity owners, things get rather… simple.

With SSI, my bank or credit union, for example, first ensures that they’re dealing with me, then connects with me and issues one or more verifiable credentials that I can keep in my SSI digital wallet. Later, when I call in, walk in, or login, I present these credentials back to the institution, which they instantly verify and we’re done. No username or password, with all the attendant usability and security problems, is needed. See this excellent blog and video from IBM, Workday, ATB Financial and the province of British Columbia for how it all comes together.

And no intermediary is required. And no answering of silly questions about my birthday or mother’s maiden name, which are probably already in the public domain anyway thanks to Equifax.

If I later want to use that financial credential somewhere other than my financial institution — such as a website that would LOVE to onboard genuine humans who are provably banked — it can be strongly and instantly verified by any relying party I share it with, without having to check with the issuing financial institution.

ID Proofing & A Market for Credentials

Until government issuers begin issuing their credentials digitally, there is an opportunity for existing identity proofers to provide a valuable service for SSI owners.

Today, identity proofing work — typically verifying a person’s identity by verifying their government-issued credentials — is performed solely for the benefit of the organization that hired the proofer. For example, when Airbnb does identity verification of a new user, Airbnb is the only entity that benefits from the proofing work performed.

With SSI, that proofing work can result in a digital credential issued by the proofing service directly to the person being proofed, where he/she can use it with Airbnb or anywhere else, for as long as that proof is considered current. Future verifiers who accept this credential will benefit even though they didn’t originally pay for the proofing work, but they could remunerate the original proofing service each time the credential is verified, creating an interesting recurring business model for quality identity proofers.

This is just one example of what a market for verifiable credentials might look like.

Myth 6: There’s a built-in method of authenticating.

Real SSI doesn’t dictate a specific means of authentication, either. It offers a protocol that supports any authentication method that two (or more) parties opt to use. One implementation might use facial or voice biometrics while another uses proof of location, and another simply exchanges digitally signed attestations, which are incredibly strong.

When it comes to usernames and passwords… I wish shared secrets would go away forever, and thankfully SSI absolutely does have the potential to eliminate usernames and passwords, as we saw in IBM’s video above.

Innovation in biometrics — a big part of everyone’s digital future — is moving at a breakneck speed. With SSI there’s no need to lock into one biometric modality, or even to the entire category of biometrics; it’s possible to abstract the means of authentication as a pluggable type of verifiable credential, leaving flexibility for future technologies.

I’m particularly interested in authentication modalities involving location or state such as velocity, temperature, or other calculations, which will have broad implications for the Internet of Things. The possibilities are exciting, and the required puzzle pieces now exist to make this a reality.

Myth 7: User-centric identity is the same as SSI.

I addressed one aspect of this myth in my last post: some identity services call their offerings self-sovereign, when they’re really still siloed and dependent on a single organization. Turn off the servers on that organization, and it all goes away.

I first saw the term “user-centric identity” in Christopher Allen’s seminal post, The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity, which describes it in greater detail than I will here. Basically, user-centric identity gives the user greater control than before, and that’s a good thing, but it never realized its original intent — user independence — and it actually left large intermediaries with even more power than before. Facebook and Google, the biggest beneficiaries of the move to user-centric identity, would call their services user-centric.

Even the term gives it away: you’re still a user and not the owner, and that means the underlying service is siloed or federated, not self-sovereign. Of course with SSI there are services provided by third parties, such as cloud agent hosting and relationship management apps and tools, but they are modular and replaceable.

In simple terms, with SSI you can fire your service providers without losing your data or relationships, which you can’t easily do when you are a user. Before long we’ll see Facebook without Facebook and Twitter without Twitter, as SSI makes possible completely decentralized alternatives to those services: you can fire them and switch providers without losing your friends, followers, etc.

Why is the independence that SSI affords so important? Two primary reasons:

1. Permanent, vendor-independent control of data, including credentials, consent, history, and more;
2. Permanent, vendor-independent control of relationships, including discrete, encrypted, peer-to-peer connections with each.

Imagine changing your address in only one master place (finally!), and only those you allow to subscribe to it automatically getting the update. Imagine having one master set of contacts (finally!), each with a persistent, encrypted communication link that only you and that party have the keys to, and no vendor in the world can take them away.

I get excited every time I think about it.

User-centric identity may seem on the surface to be similar to SSI, but under the hood, where it counts most, it suffers from all the disadvantages of siloed or federated/IDP-based identity.

In sum, there are many myths about SSI that need to be cleared up, not just seven. There are also many new capabilities that SSI brings that I have barely touched on so far. It is a watershed event in digital identity — such a different way of thinking that we will need to experiment with the messaging until we can achieve accuracy with brevity when describing it.

If there are specific issues you’d like to see covered in greater detail, by me or anyone else on the Evernym team, please leave a comment below or tweet @RuffTimo.

Part 1, Myths 1–3, can be read here.

Footnotes:

¹ With Sovrin SSI, only credentials that have been explicitly shared with a verifier by their owner can be verified.

Founded in 2013, Evernym helps organizations implement self-sovereign identity, and individuals to manage and utilize their self-sovereign identity. Learn more at evernym.com.

7 Myths of Self-Sovereign Identity was originally published in Evernym on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here at Evernym we consider ourselves to be in a very privileged position: we get to tell the world about Self-sovereign identity (SSI). In fact, we’ve already spoken to hundreds, perhaps thousands of people from all over the world, in nearly every market imaginable. Frankly, it’s infectiously fun to be part of the SSI revolution. This new technology will create exceptional amounts of opportunity across the globe and may finally right the wrongs of much of today’s digital identity woes. There is almost no industry it doesn’t touch.

The questions that we’re most often asked are ‘when?’, followed by ‘how?’.

When will this technology take off in a meaningful way?

When should I start experimenting?

When should I invest in development?

How should I experiment?

How should I get involved?

How will this affect my business?

From our vantage point, the answers seem rather obvious — and the ‘when’ is a lot sooner than you might think. Certainly soon enough that investment and exploration should be top priorities. In terms of the ‘how’, we’ve conveniently got the tools and expertise to help.

That said, with any new technology, there is a well-trodden path towards market adoption and ubiquity that one must follow. SSI is no different. We need to get out of R&D labs and into production, ‘crossing the chasm’ so to speak. Innovation teams are wonderful, they’ve self-selected to be interested, they’ve studied the technical white papers, and they’re a huge asset in building credibility within an organization. But we only really start to create impact when we take our learnings out of the Lab and into the real world.

To drive uptake and to achieve adoption, we need to simplify the message around SSI. The value proposition needs to be crisper, and we need to lower the barrier to understanding. Essentially we need to be able to explain to a wider audience the when, the how, and additionally, the why.

Naturally, and because we love a challenge, we’re also contending with the world’s realization that blockchain is not quite a panacea for everything.

One answer, of course, is proof. Not proof that the world needs SSI, that argument is made convincingly by Equifax, Facebook, and whichever data-silo-house-of-cards is next to fall. Nor should we hope to find some magical proof that blockchain technology can or should solve all problems for all people today.

We need real, demonstrable proof that in leveraging blockchain technology, true SSI can be achieved, and that far from being an end unto itself, the human and business benefits more than justify the investment — and we need to do so in way that can be easily understood by a broad audience.

Enough talk, enough theory, it’s time to walk the walk

With this in mind, we’ve been busy building software that works seamlessly with Sovrin, and which really brings SSI to life in a meaningful way. Let’s skip past the techno-babble and take a look at the implications for the user. How much faster, simpler, better, does it make their experience? And, the elephant in the room, why would any organization care?

To this end, we’ve partnered with some of the most innovative organizations in their respective industries, who all share our passion for privacy and user-centric customer experience, to deliver the ‘Job-Creds’ SSI project. It brings together our partner IBM, alongside ATB Financial, the Sovrin Foundation, Workday, and Evernym, and for the first time gives us a glimpse of what an SSI world will look like. Best of all, it demonstrates a vastly improved user experience, while cutting costs for every organization involved, through streamlined processes.

The project was designed to prove the viability of SSI as a solution to actual business problems in a realistic way. Beyond the video, this project is growing organically, and there’ll be some more exciting names joining soon.

Job-Creds is one of several projects we’re actively working on to prove SSI is ready for the prime time. We’ll shortly be releasing further news and results from that project, as well as officially introducing our ‘Accelerator’ program, a curated SSI community, so stay tuned!

Update December 2018 — Follow the next installment of our getting to market strategy here: https://medium.com/evernym/identity-is-evolving-time-for-pocs-to-do-the-same-2bef1b63f052

Founded in 2013, Evernym helps organizations implement self-sovereign identity, and individuals to manage and utilize their self-sovereign identity. Learn more at evernym.com

Crossing the Chasm was originally published in Evernym on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There’s a brilliant series of promotional videos called “Will it blend?” set in a 70s-style game show, where the host takes various items and asks “Will it blend?” before sticking them into a blender. Ipads, snow skis, golf clubs, even super glue and silly putty have been blended into oblivion, with often surprising results that viewers get to see repeated in slow motion (and which I find highly entertaining).

After seeing a raft of identity startups over the last couple of years, I’m now tempted to start a similar series called “Is it self-sovereign?” Haven’t figured out the blender part though…

I’ve lost track of new identity startups, there are simply too many. Blockchain is the driving force behind the surge, of course, and ICOs. Take a piece of identity information, hash it, stick it on a blockchain (which is actually a bad idea, and non-GDPR-compliant) and… voila! Identity is solved, along with a fast new means of funding the venture. Big problem, straightforward solution, white-hot new field of technology, quick fundraising.

I get it. And I actually don’t mind the competition; the more companies in the space, the more attention it brings to the exciting new possibilities of solving the current problems of identity. And I’m flattered to see, on a good number of occasions, that these new startups are adopting the concepts, terminology, code, and in some cases even the exact diagrams that we have pioneered with Sovrin. I just heard about two other projects which also use the phrase “global public utility” for identity, which our very own Drummond Reed originated.

One concept and term we did not pioneer, however, but have fully embraced, and that I feel particularly strongly about, is “self-sovereign identity” (SSI for short). It is one that should be used more carefully than it has been, because I believe SSI can (and will) change just about every online interaction for the better, and even improve offline verifications. Misuse of the label will only confuse folks, weaken its perception, and consequently slow the adoption of this awesome new technology.

Since there is no authority to appeal to for the proper use of the term SSI, it’s logical to stick with the literal meaning of the words. The words “self” and “identity” have baggage enough, but for the purpose of this piece let’s use their most common meanings — “self” is a person and “identity” is how you identify them — which leaves us to defining “sovereign.”

“Sovereign” means the king of the hill, the top of the heap, the final arbiter. A country is sovereign when it doesn’t have to answer to another country. Kings are often called sovereigns because they have full and final authority.

So what does it mean for a person to be the “sovereign” ruler, owner, and final arbiter over their identity?

We’ve come up with a number of tests of true self-sovereignty, which are still accurate, but if I had to choose only one test it would be this:

Does the identity service depend on a single, proprietary provider, or can you fire them and move your credentials and relationships to a different provider?

Digital identity requires the use of technology, so if you don’t have the means or interest to become your own provider of that technology — and most of us do not — you’ll need to engage the services of a provider. If you cannot fire that service provider and move to another one, while keeping all your credentials and relationships, then your digital identity is not self-sovereign, even if it uses some form of blockchain technology.

If you leave Facebook, you lose your friends. Leave Twitter, you lose your followers. Leave XYZ identity service, you lose your credentials or your ability to express them. If those services were truly self-sovereign, your friends, followers, and credentials would be yours, fully portable between service providers.

In, Sovrin we call these service providers “agencies,” and what makes Sovrin truly self-sovereign is that these agencies must support portability. Which means they must compete for your loyalty.

This test alone renders probably 98% of identity services as not being self-sovereign. And if government can step in and limit or take your service away (unlikely in some places, more likely in others), one could argue that it technically isn’t self-sovereign even if you have portability between service providers, which leads to the interesting topic of which aspects of a self-sovereign identity can be truly self-sovereign and which cannot — the subject of a future post.

For now, I invite readers to recognize in the marketplace when vendors are incorrectly using the term self-sovereign to imply benefits that really do not exist.

True self-sovereignty is hard. It is hard not only technically but also from a business standpoint, as the service provider must be willing to become vulnerable to being fired by their customers and left behind if they do not perform. Providing tools to help someone manage a truly self-sovereign identity must be a meritocracy, where loyalty is earned, not forced. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be self-sovereign, would it?

Let the meritocracy begin.

Founded in 2013, Evernym helps organizations implement self-sovereign identity, and individuals to manage and utilize their self-sovereign identity. Learn more at evernym.com.

Is it Really Self-Sovereign? was originally published in Evernym on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I joined Evernym as a Product Manager at the start of April, 2018. I was captured by Evernym’s ambition to provide every individual, organization, and connected device with secure and irrevocable identity. This identity will allow new relationships that will empower individuals as they participate in the modern technology-centered economy. You can read this article to learn more about existing digital identity relationship models and how Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) is different.

We believe that an open dialogue with our community will help everyone move faster in achieving these goals, so I will keep you updated on Evernym’s progress in this and future posts. Evernym has a talented team doing great work, but we aren’t going to be successful by keeping our inventions private.

For Evernym to achieve our mission, we need:

• The Hyperledger Indy open source project to be an innovative and stable platform for building distributed identity networks.
• The Sovrin Foundation to be successful in running a global public utility for self-sovereign identity.
• Independent developers and businesses to build solutions that are easily adopted by people from every walk of life.

To meet these goals, we recently released our library for Verifiable Credential eXchange (libVCX) under a permissive open source license. This is the foundation of our commercial products, and we want it to be leveraged by every developer and entrepreneur in the identity ecosystem. We are working to integrate this capability into the Hyperledger Indy project.

We are also enjoying collaborating with developers from other institutions to create a set of reference agents that represent individuals as they exchange identity credentials. These reference agents can be used by solution providers to speed their development.

Hyperledger Indy and Sovrin are quickly growing beyond a single corporate sponsor, and we appreciate the broad support others are providing to advance the vision for the future that they represent.

We hope you will join us in building a citizen-centric Internet. Check back to see updates on our progress.

Open Source Tools for Creating Digital Identities was originally published in Evernym on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today it was officially announced that Evernym has joined Hyperledger. It may strike readers familiar with our history as odd to learn that we’ve just now officially become part of the effort, since we are the inventors of Hyperledger Indy, one of the five Hyperledger projects. But this is how it’s worked out.

It might be worth reviewing the history of Indy.

Evernym was originally conceived as a top to bottom self sovereign identity (SSI) solution, encompassing everything from the application to a proprietary distributed ledger and everything in between.

One of the core principles of SSI is the idea that a user’s identity must remain forever under her control and never be subject to the whims, weaknesses nor future prospects of any centralized entity. That being the case, the idea that even we be in control of the ledger to which users’ decentralized identifiers be written was inconsistent with our mission.

Thus, in the fall of 2015 we decided to find the best way to make the ledger truly independent, and recognized that the solution was to give it away. At the time we didn’t know exactly what that meant, apart from the fact that we would be turning the ledger into a global public utility upon which any entity (including future Evernym competitors) could build their own SSI applications.

The first step was to create the Sovrin Foundation and turn control of the ledger software over to this non-profit. Then, in the winter of 2016, the suggestion was made to turn the Sovrin code over to Hyperledger. A few months later, the process was complete and Hyperledger Project Indy was born.

‘Indy’, as an aside, got its name by virtue of its goal of achieving a truly independent distributed ledger for SSI applications. And indeed, it was the high value we place on its independence that kept Evernym from joining Hyperledger until now. We felt that our pride as the creators of Indy might cause us to exert inappropriate influence over its initial formative stages. And thus we maintained a very active interest in Hyperledger goings on, and even took steps to stimulate developer participation in the open source project, but otherwise kept our distance.

Today the Sovrin Foundation and Indy are standing quite capably on their own two feet, which helps us feel very comfortable participating in Hyperledger directly. As alluded to earlier, this puts us in the seemingly awkward position of working to promote an ecosystem serving not only our own applications but also those of competitors. Yet we find this gratifying as it will bring the world better SSI technology and speed along the process of broad-based adoption of the Sovrin protocols.

The possibilities awaiting Hyperledger and Indy are limitless. And we look forward to being part of the process.

Evernym joins Hyperledger was originally published in Evernym on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The EU’s new data protection regulations went into effect on May 25. In this episode, Elizabeth Renieris and Jamie Smith, two experts on GDPR, discuss the impact of the rules on individuals and businesses, while looking at how distributed technologies like blockchain and peer to peer technologies like those built by Evernym, factor into this new reality.

GDPR, Data Protection and Blockchain was originally published in Evernym on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.