Who's who and what's what
A curated list of relevant standards, projects, organized groups and references that are in the space of digital identity.
The following curated list of standards, projects, organized groups and other links of interest comprise the basis for many of the technical elements that we have discovered along the journey.
Identity Standards
A collection of existing digital identity standards that are currently utilized or under development. Note that in many cases the digital identity standards may resolve to any connected ‘thing’, not necessarily the identity of a human.
Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs)
DIDs take advantage of the emergence of Distributed Ledger Technology (blockchain). The specification is being developed by the W3C Credentials Community Group and is currently a DRAFT only.
Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) are a new type of identifier for verifiable, “self-sovereign” digital identity. DIDs are fully under the control of the DID subject, independent from any centralized registry, identity provider, or certificate authority.
OpenId Connect is the modern specification that originated as OpenId and had an early version 1.1 written in May of 2006. The specification is written and maintained by a collection of working groups all operating under the umbrella OpenId Foundation.
OpenID Connect is an interoperable authentication protocol based on the OAuth 2.0 family of specifications. It uses straightforward REST/JSON message flows with a design goal of “making simple things simple and complicated things possible”. It’s uniquely easy for developers to integrate, compared to any preceding Identity protocol.
Microsoft Distributed Identity
Security and Access Control
Although the boundaries of “identity” and “security” are blurred in many
SAFE
Secure network layer
WACL
Web Access Control Lists (?)
Social Media Platforms
Hubzilla
Friendica
Mastodon
GNU Social
Google plus demise prompting adoption of this distributed social network.
Productivity
dokieli
API components
The client-server API is made of HTTP and LDP and WACL and some glue, extra HTTP headers, a little posix metadata. That is a significant, but finite, spec., which every Solid server must meet
Course curriculum
MIT 6.S974, Decentralized Applications, Fall 2018
Working groups
OpenId Foundation The OpenID Foundation (OIDF) promotes, protects and nurtures the OpenID community and technologies.
The OpenID Foundation is a non-profit international standardization organization of individuals and companies committed to enabling, promoting and protecting OpenID technologies. Formed in June 2007, the foundation serves as a public trust organization representing the open community of developers, vendors, and users. OIDF assists the community by providing needed infrastructure and help in promoting and supporting expanded adoption of OpenID. This entails managing intellectual property and brand marks as well as fostering viral growth and global participation in the proliferation of OpenID.
W3C Credentials Community Group
The mission of the Credentials Community Group is to explore the creation, storage, presentation, verification, and user control of credentials. We focus on a verifiable credential (a set of claims) created by an issuer about a subject—a person, group, or thing—and seek solutions inclusive of approaches such as: self-sovereign identity; presentation of proofs by the bearer; data minimization; and centralized, federated, and decentralized registry and identity systems. Our tasks include drafting and incubating Internet specifications for further standardization and prototyping and testing reference implementations.