Current baseline stack does not support Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI)

[Therecanbeonlyone1969]

Overview

The current baseline stack does not support self-sovereign identity based on W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and W3C Verifiable Credentials (VCs). That means there is no way to verify, in a privacy-preserving manner, the identity of a counterparty, engage in a commercial relationship, and generate digital document proofs that could be used in a judicial proceeding without having established a bilateral relationship (Bilateral) prior to engaging with Baseline. This means that supply chains built on interlinked Bilaterals cannot be mapped into the Baseline protocol since legal and other compliance requirements such as embargos on the identity of supply chain participants cannot be established without revealing some business information about all participants in the supply chain that compromises the privacy and existing business relationships of the participants.

Reference

• https://identity.foundation/
• https://sovrin.org/use-case-spotlight-enterprise-identity-access-with-esatus-self/
• https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/
• https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/

Questions

• Is SSI really required for Baseline?

Assumptions

• While one-off Baseline implementations do not require an ecosystem identity, as soon as there is a network of Baseline providers with Baseline-as-a-Service or similar offerings, it is required to have a decentralized/federated identity model for the ecosystem in order to establish trust anchors beyond bilateral relationships

Acceptance

• Proven IAM and ACL using SSI for every layer of the Baseline Stack

Tasks

• A whole lot! To start off with we need a Baseline identity task force that works closely with other identity-focused orgs such as DIF (https://identity.foundation/)

[KirkBallou]

There are two paths here to implement DID based authentication: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/1056 Lightweight DID implementation. Uport and energy web are working on implementations around this EIP. Ref: https://github.com/energywebfoundation/ew-did-registry or https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/725

Thoughts @humbitious @kthomas

[bitwiseguy]

Hey all, since this is more of a discussion topic and not an immediately addressable issue I am going to move it into the roadmap repo. The baseline maintainers team have decided to limit issues in the code repo to tasks that are workable now.