The W3C Credentials Community Group

Verifiable Claims and Digital Verification

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Credentials CG Telecon

Minutes for 2015-08-18

Agenda
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-credentials/2015Aug/0032.html
Topics
  1. Recruiting
  2. IMS Global Update
  3. Capabilities Document
Organizer
Kim Hamilton Duffy, Christopher Allen
Scribe
Matt Stone
Present
Matt Stone, Richard Varn, Manu Sporny, Pindar Wong, Nate Otto, Brendan Benshoof, Dave Longley, Andrew Rosen, David I. Lehn, Laura Fowler
Audio Log
Matt Stone is scribing.

Topic: Recruiting

Richard Varn: Prometric is a "no" on joining W3C

Topic: IMS Global Update

Manu Sporny: Expect a full update next week after the conference

Topic: Capabilities Document

Manu Sporny: Will review and introduce the details of the expected/desired capabilities of the standard. picking up where we left off last week
Manu Sporny: Web based PKI - allows individuals who don't own a domain (most people) to participate and have control of their own identity
Manu Sporny: Far more accessible
Pindar Wong: Fwiw note https://letsencrypt.org/ for late this year
Nate Otto: New/casual users may not follow best practices and their key could get compromised -what do they do?
Manu Sporny: Key lists "owner" and others who have "key management" responsibility. you may be one of the "others" from another device and have a way manage your key.
Nate Otto: Does this date based invalidation require some kind of trusted timestamping mechanism on credentials?
Manu Sporny: Financial industry uses dedicated hardware in offline datacenters for key management at the highest security level
Pindar Wong: :)
Nate Otto: Yeah, I can certainly see trustworthy timestaming as a use case for the multiple signatures on a credential mechanism.
Pindar Wong: Blockchain ?
Brendan Benshoof: Will have to do work to convince people to use PKI
Manu Sporny: Will have to hide it.
Matt Stone: This gets to casual user managing their keys - if I have 3 devices with computers/tablets - key for each one - how much do I have to repeat that whole exercise of saying "I need 3 signatures to change anything"? [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Manu Sporny: Expressing assumption/expectation that people will use an identity provider
Dave Longley: The system is flexible; you choose the level of security and convenience that works for you. Most people will delegate key management to their identity provider.
Matt Stone: Do identity providers exist today?
Manu Sporny: Not today - no standard yet (that's what were here today) would advocate for existing ID providers like G+, Facebook etc would adopt
Manu Sporny: Individuals could self-sign claims about themselves, but nobody is going to trust that signature, because it's not authoritative. If the US Government issues a credential saying your name is James Dean, then people in the US would likely trust it. [scribe assist by Nate Otto]
Manu Sporny: Expect choice of identity providers, open source and commercial
Manu Sporny: Stakeholders can determine what types of providers to trust
Pindar Wong: Thanks... I need to drop off now, looking fwd to reading the minutes. tks all for an interesting call.
Manu Sporny: App Integration - probably most open to interpretation. user should be able to grant system access to your credentials
Manu Sporny: .... For non-interactive manner
Manu Sporny: Need more focus to describe what this really means to us
Manu Sporny: Privacy-enhanced Sharing: share a credentiaal in a way that prevents identity provider to track you and your activities
Dave Longley: Similar to SSO on the web like g+ or twitter, so the SSO provider knows where your logging it. this concept of privacy isn't support in SSO today
Dave Longley: A key desire it to prevent/block identity providers from knowing who the credential is shared with or who's verifying it
Manu Sporny: Unlike other capabilities, we're taking a philosophical stance here
Manu Sporny: Protocol would be setup so it's impossible for ID providers to know where a credential was shared
Brendan Benshoof: Need a way to unravel the privacy-enhanced sharing for things like law enforcement - we need another bullet point.
Dave Longley: "Regulatory compliance"?
Brendan Benshoof: Need to include the concept of regulatory requirements for privacy in our capability
Andrew Rosen: +1 Regulatory compliance
Matt Stone: +1 Regulatory compliance
Manu Sporny: Many of the credential and finance cases exist in industries/ecosystems that are heavily regulated
Manu Sporny: Credential portability - should be able to move credentials between identity providers on demand
Andrew Rosen: +Q Can we do anything more sophisticated than a credential TTL?
Manu Sporny: Credential revocation: support a way to revoke a credential if issued erroneously
Manu Sporny: All data is "linked data" with an id that lives on the web somewhere, which is verified in realtime.
Matt Stone: Revocation, in reality, happens much less than updating a credential - how do you have living data? [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Nate Otto: +1 Stonematt Updating / renewing a credential happens far more often than revoking credentials in practice.
Brendan Benshoof: How do we make it simple for issuers to manage this kind of technical capability when they're historically so bad at it?
Manu Sporny: There will be licensed technology provides. expect the verification/validation app to be simple to host
Manu Sporny: Responding to stonematt... since this is "linked data" the credential could be fairly short lived and be linked back to the issuer for details OR may have a "refresh" link with update data
Nate Otto: In the news today about PKI: Here's a bunch of people's private SSH keys published publicly on GitHub: https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=filename%3Aid_rsa&type=Code&ref=searchresults
Matt Stone: This is a more sophisticated approach/solution than the simple verification url in the previous response. Benefit - the system is very flexible in the way it can be deployed.
Andrew Rosen: No questions. Thanks!
Andrew Rosen: We managed to sneak a lot of those in.