Thesis: self-sovereign identity (SSI)

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Current status:

• Full-time for 11 November onwards (first courses)
• ToDo: formulate Cum Laude scientific idea
• Re-usage of Superapp infrastructure with IPv8
• cooperation with ministry
• tamper-proof hardware: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5921
• Ask Stephan Wong faculty member for his Computer Engineering expertise?
• Idea: Build and trail a secure identity wallet with Passport and Euro contents
• Idea: use OpenTitan silicon root-of-trust
• idea: import quantum randomness through the open GPIO pins, latest science (too immature tech)
• Too hardware focused (e.g. Firmware flashing and OS compile debugging?
• Also involve the TBM people for the legally valid signature on behalf of a legal entity?
• Deadline: 1 Dec 2020 have a Problem Description in 1 page
• Deadline graduation: current rules Tuesday 31 Aug 2021 graduation (this has not changed)
• ToDo: Sicco check of cybersecurity assignment

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Please study this master thesis format for Cum Laude: https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/issues/5221#issuecomment-855911194

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Progress:

Article:

• Created table comparing other revocation algorithms
• Improved structure of article
• TODO:
  • Remove some less relevant information
  • Add section on scalability (still in progress of creating graphs)

Thesis:

• Finished piece on Identity and SSI:
  • Philosophical nature of identity
  • Digital identity (introduced a small model describing the current ecosystem)
  • Evolution of digital identity
  • Problems in digital identity
  • Recorded the history of SSI for the first time (?) in academia
  • Discussed shortcoming of the term and proposed a new one
  • Discussed what SSI is through properties and proposed a new framework (needs perhaps another revision) aiding a definition of SSI.
• TODO:
  • Write design piece on SSI (can be copied from article and then extended upon)
  • Write about ethics
  • Write about the lifecycle
  • Write about benefits for users
  • Write evaluation

Test plan:

• Need another day or two to finish test plan. Have drafted scenario's, but still need to strengthen them and define metrics.

DRAFT_Article_13-06-2021.pdf DRAFT_Thesis_13-06-2021.pdf DRAFT_Test_Plan_14-06-2021.pdf

Published Dutch SSI blogpost: https://digicampus.tech/hoe-creeer-je-online-vertrouwen/

Thesis structure guidelines: https://www.tudelft.nl/studenten/ewi-studentenportal/onderwijs/afstuderen-msc/thesis-report

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Great article first draft! Please put the table first, as hook for your storyline that after 48 years since invention of public key crypto its not ready yet. Mark red (smaller) and green checks (bigger) plus clearly: this work. Turn table, more citations? Add Problem Description? 5 people trail for system validation? Or "cross-border-scan" German Government official scans a QR code generated by Dutch citizens and signed by Dutch Kingdom official?

btw Gemeente Hoorn crypto deployment for citizens: https://github.com/discipl/waardepapieren/projects/2

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Progress Update

• Spent mostly writing Thesis:
  • Have come a long way with main body. Document nearly 80 pages
• Article fixed table, still requires some removal of irrelevant/too detailed information.
  • Need to add results showcasing propagation time.
  • Finish this week
  • Look for conference (?)
• Testing plan is now a single scenario showcasing both credentials and revocation.
• Have presentation about thesis this afternoon for Cybsec.
• Had a talk with Prof Epema.

Thesis-Draft-30-60-21.pdf Article-Draft-30-60-21.pdf Testing-Plan-30-60-21.pdf

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• consider switching thesis format radically and use article as first chapter. Then move to supplementary material. 14 page Delft msc thesis
• Experimental setup "Firstly, a storage for 300.000 hashes of 32 bytes each, results in a space usage of at least 9.2 megabytes" :+1:
• Screenshot in article :iphone: ???
• Propose:
  • work until 16 Juli on experimental results (maximum 3-4 amazing graphs)
  • Finish scientific article: 30 July
  • Then thesis supplementary material till 16 Aug.
• First is emulation graphs, secondary perhaps a Jupyter Notebook for theoretical performance bounds?
• thesis storyline is too broad. Offline support as a first-class requirement. That's the innovation. Lack clarity.
• You turned sovereign fantasies into Kotlin reality. Where is that represented in thesis?

  This chapter describes the overall outline of the thesis. Firstly, the research area is introduced, providing brief insights into the
  topic of Self-Sovereign Identity. Next, the motivation for this research is discussed, touching upon current shortcomings and
  opportunities for SSI. Then, the research questions are discussed. Finally, the contributions of this work
  are highlighted and the outline of the remainder of the document is given.

• My preference is less boilerplate in a thesis and more condense formatting: We introduce the topic of Self-Sovereign Identity, discuss the motivation for this research, and outline the research questions of this thesis.
• Switch to master thesis format, not phd thesis. Too Soon :medal_sports: Page 3 and 5 has lots of empty space.
• Background chapter, make an explicit "Problem Description". Probably existing content can fit into intro and problem chapter.
• 2.6.4. THE PYRAMID OF SOVEREIGNTY, "Figure 2.4: The Pyramid of Sovereignty", make explicit this is your model, give it a name. If existence and control are the two pillar on which everything else is build :bridge_at_night:. You get a hanging bridge type of mental model.
• 2.5.1. HISTORY; merge with related work.
• Inside "2.5.2": SSI gives absolute control over identity. "This misconceptualisation is most likely caused due to the ambiguous nature of the term Self-Sovereignty. As we established that self-sovereignty does not lead to self-attested, the dependency on attestation directly deteriorates the level of control one has over claims." You're putting a lengthy tutorial in there. Information density is too low in many parts of thesis. chapter 2 ends on page 34. Make that page 13 or so!
• "Figure 3.1: The relationship between credentials and (verifiable) claims" size of fonts mismatch with thesis text
• "In a centralised fashion, SSL-certificates are achieved through Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)." No tutorials, especially not on page 37 (beyond intro chapter)
• 3.2. ARCHITECTURE; move into related work.
• 3.2.1. REQUIRED FUNCTIONALITIES; part of the problem description chapter
• "Figure 3.6: Interactive Verification" move this to introduction chapter and give it depth.
• "As yearly up to 340.000 identity documents are stolen in a country as The Netherlands, the same amount of revocations must be possible on a year basis"; deeply burried text, promote into problem description.
• no implementation and performance analysis chapter
• Nieuwsuur; embarrassing ref: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=identity+documents+loss+and+theft

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Progress Update:

• Focused on results and article in general
• Restructure in thesis

Thesis-Draft-13-07-21.pdf

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• Green light :confetti_ball: :confetti_ball: :confetti_ball:
• Needs more science-focus
  • theoretical performance bound!
  • Math approach, like Stannat did: http://www.ifaamas.org/Proceedings/aamas2021/pdfs/p1263.pdf
  • the missing revocation layer in "Problem Description".
  • 'Reliable revocation using unreliable communication links'; that what you did?
  • Page 11 table: it was unsolved, but we have solved it!! Move to 2nd page on top. (alter, make each published paper a row)
  • first 8 figures are not 100% scientific, lots of engineering
  • No opening architecture figure
  • Title of "industry-grade" is not scientific (but excellent thesis direction :smile:)
  • Math and pseudo code come too late
  • "The Hybrid-Revocation Model (HRM)" anything less boring tbh?
  • Internet lacks identity layer. Key problem to address is revocation. Existing attempts critically rely on communication with central authorities and introduce inequality into the architecture. For the first time we address these problems. We claim our architecture is a viable candidate for the upcoming European-wide identity standard. Our small-scale trail shows that this is a promising direction to further explore.
  • remove subtitle: "On the Realisation of a Fully Distributed Self-Sovereign Identity Framework"
  • Sovrin cryptographic accumulators are complex and too costly. Proof?
• lots of boilerplate pages (65 pages total, not close to the record 14 :-) Bundle appendix into 1 supplementary material section
• You did a live trail! Is that not a "key scientific contribution" to mention? (Creative Commons, CC0)

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Thesis-Draft-23-07-21.pdf

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• Page 14: start of the real content, remove even more bloilerplate and clutter. No part " I. " page or "preface" please.
• Opening table: "state of the art in revocation".
• Claim to novelty? first 'fully distributed revocation'. We relax the requirements which are critical in prior works, such as a reliable central server and reliable Internet.
• Our work stretches the spectrum of theoretical analysis, simulation, and real-world deployment.
• nice theory section now! Read and mention more related work: Kwiatkowska. Plus also obviously: 1987 "Epidemic algorithms for replicated database maintenance".
• Lemma 2.1 "spontaneously go offline" why not use a more exciting "sporadically are online"?
• Messy structure: explains with 1) wordy Trusted Authority Storage, 2) Algorithm 3: Revocation Gossip and finally 3) An edge (i, j) ∈ E represents a throughput link of information from node i to j.
• Need better structure: (Section II now has the theory, but is called Revocation Design)
  • Section 2: "Problem Description"
  • Section 3: "Related work" with table
  • Section 4: "Architecture and analysis" or something
  • Section 5: "Algorithms and simulation"
  • Section 6: "Implementation and field trail"
  • Section 7: "Performance analysis"
• Messy figure: "Fig. 12: Simulated propagation time (all gossip intervals)" 3D is unreadable.
• "Deteriorating the assumption", "to the remainder of the group of uninformed to the nodes"
• Simplified storyline:
  • no "Industry-Grade", simply the first solution believe to be usable for mass usage because meets both primary and secondary requirements.
  • no "Hybrid Revocation Model", simply the first fully distributed

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Article revision: Article30.pdf (Thesis draft too messy)

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Offline usage is important: flooding of cities results in Alipay going offline. Digital identities should be disaster-proof.

Or the de-platforming storyline, revocations are a collaborative alternative to Big Tech dictatorships of identity layer. Deplatforming: Your identity gets canceled by a profit-driven entity. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0267323120922066

Extreme, anti-establishment actors are being characterized increasingly as ‘dangerous individuals’ by the social media
platforms that once aided in making them into ‘Internet celebrities’. These individuals (and sometimes groups) are
being ‘deplatformed’ by the leading social media companies such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube for
such offences as ‘organised hate’. Deplatforming has prompted debate about ‘liberal big tech’ silencing free speech
and taking on the role of editors, but also about the questions of whether it is effective and for whom.

Revocations intro line; because of theft, loss, and big data breaches: https://www.csoonline.com/article/2130877/the-biggest-data-breaches-of-the-21st-century.html

Problem: we need revocations for mass-deployment. Cardinal requirement is that its need to be authority-free. Violating this requirement violates the principles of self-sovereignty itself.

Table I shows no fully distributed SSI revocation mechanism has been proposed yet. First sentence of related work

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~Rowdy_Chotkan_MSc_Thesis_IG-SSI.pdf~ Rowdy_Chotkan_MSc_Thesis_IG-SSI.pdf

URL: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:32711378-2f6f-452e-b65c-1866c471e934

As also submitted via mail.

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Slides WIP.pptx

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Remarks: Example claim/verifier within your fully operational prototype using real Corona example JSON Where is your contribution to European Commission roadmap

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~Defence-Slides-draft.zip~ ~Defence-Slides.pptx~ Defence-Slides-Final.zip

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Msc Thesis DONE