Ensuring Data Integrity & Authenticity in a Solid Pod

[laurensdeb]

Pitch

Once data is written into a Solid Pod, it is outside of the control of an authentic data source. For some data in the Pod, the user themselves may be the authentic source, like for their contact information or calendar. However, for other kinds of data like your high school or university diploma's, your driver's license and national identity card, an external party like a government or company is the source. When sharing the data originating from these parties, we want to uphold their integrity and authenticity to ensure that they can be validated by a data consumer.

Desired solution

The broader W3C community has proposed the use of Verifiable Credentials in order for a particular issuer, i.e. an organization, government or even an end-user themselves, to assert certain identity claims. The current framework of Verifiable Credentials does not consider the use of a personal data vault to store these Credentials, however the concept of repository might be closely related to what we want to achieve with Solid. While we have been able to identify a number of similarities between concepts in the VC and Solid specifications, we are still lacking formal alignment between the two domains.

Our desired solution to this challenge would be as follows:

• We have outlined the advantages and disadvantages of different solutions for Linked Data Integrity & Authenticity in relation to Solid.
• We are able to align the concepts and terminology of the Verifiable Credentials data model to Solid's concepts of Pods and WebIDs.
• The concept of a WebID can be integrated into the Verifiable Credentials data model by extending the Profile document with any additional relevant properties.
• We have defined the technical and functional requirements for providing a Credential Holder backed by a Solid Pod as credential repository, e.g. concerning secrets management, user interface, authentication, ...

Acceptance criteria

TBD

Pointers

• https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/
• https://github.com/uvdsl/solid-vc-pwa

Scenarios

• https://github.com/SolidLabResearch/Challenges/issues/73

[pheyvaer]

@RubenVerborgh Shouldn't this challenge have criteria?

[RubenVerborgh]

I'm assuming those from #73.

[pheyvaer]

Ok. @laurensdeb For completeness sake, can you add the criteria in this challenge as well? Thanks!

[laurensdeb]

@pheyvaer I will be adding these, probably towards the end of this week.