Digital Credentials for a Safer World
This should have been a tweet. But the format was not fitting.
The promise of a personal decentralized identity is that the trust component involved in your use of credentials in the real world can be replicated online. In the real world, when you present your driving license to a law enforcement officer during a periodical check, the officer checks its validity and legitimacy by looking at specific features on your driving license. Since they are a trained eye, the error rate in verifying your document is lower than what a layman would have and the accuracy even better when the officer is aided by tools such as UV light to check for holograms and other security features. Once they are satisfied with your document, you can proceed with your business or transaction at hand.
It may seem straightforward that the scenario described is replicable digitally. If the interaction between you and an academic officer or a law enforcement officer was digital, you would send a scanned copy of your driving license or school leaving certificate over email or through an online portal. Once submitted, they verify security features on the documents and either involve a senior officer or send them to a verifying body to ascertain authenticity. This takes time and before you get a confirmation that your document was approved, and that you can proceed with your intended activity, days are gone not to mention the opportunity cost involved.
While that has been largely the case in our regular interactions involving using our identifying documents and issued credentials, the bottlenecks can be minimized to make processes smoother. We should note that the document, the primary actor in the entire interaction/exchange is not truly digital. It is a scan, an image or a photograph of your certificate or license. You and I (the humans) can read and make out the information contained there. Computers cannot. We are in 2020. Computers should. If your documents were machine readable, computer systems that handle them would be able to process the information, and heck, even verify the information by themselves. Some documents today are machine readable and make information systems very efficient. But there should be a way to make this the new normal.
Enter Verifiable Credentials (VCs). An open standard that forward thinking technologists and organizations, after facing the frustrations described and seeing the potential value being locked up in non-machine-verifiable documents, came up with under the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Verifiable Credentials support machine-to-machine communication and their proofs (security features) can be verified cryptographically using the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). Issuing and Verifying authorities have their work made easier as they can independently check a common registry for proofs regarding the individual and the credential presented. There is no need for a third party to countercheck where the Mathematical proofs are well implemented and the registry, once written on is tamper proof. Such a database could be a blockchain or a sufficiently consensus driven distributed ledger.
Why should you care? Well, in this COVID-19 era, we are all trying to avoid unnecessary human contact. Because of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, even documents are being quarantined if physical copies are exchanged and more services now insist on digital forms of documents. That’s where Verifiable Credentials come in. It should be possible, once available, that a certificate proving you have been vaccinated against corona virus or that you graduated from university remotely, is shared as a Verifiable Credential. One noteworthy forward thinking initiative that is working on making this a reality is the COVID-19 Credentials Initiative (CCI). Vibranium ID is a part of it. The work of the initiative is not restricted to the pandemic as a reactive response but is a basis as to how we can unlock the promise of Verifiable Credentials.
Fun fact: After the Governance Framework (GF) of the CCI approved the CCI GF, three Kenyan software developers (Mbora Maina, Amos Kibet, Chris Achinga) and I translated the document into Kiswahili. The translation gives context as to the practicability of VCs in the real world.
Innovation waits for no man. The pandemic has proved so. The adjustment brought by this disease has surely made some processes redundant and will bring gamechanging technologies to the foreground. As Peter Drucker famously said, “Innovate or die”.
References
Figure 1: A Verifiable Credentials Primer, by Manu Sporny, Digital Bazaar
W3C Verifiable Credentials - https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/
