Decentralized Identity Foundation

Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) are an important innovation in the emerging blockchain-based / self-sovereign identity community. Identifiers such as names and numbers have always been the basis for any identity and communications systems, and while historically identifiers have been issued and maintained by central authorities, blockchains and other technologies today provide the ability for individuals, organizations, and things to register identifiers in a self-sovereign way, i.e. without any intermediaries. DIDs standardize this concept in a way that works with multiple decentralized systems such as Sovrin, Bitcoin, Blockstack, uPort, Veres One.

The Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) has started a community effort to implement a "Universal Resolver" and other tools for working with DIDs. These components fulfill a similar purpose as Bind does in the DNS system: Given a DID, one can resolve it to discover public keys, service endpoints, and other metadata associated with the entity identified by the DID. This enables higher-level data structures and protocols such as Verifiable Credentials.

In this presentation, we will introduce and demonstrate the functionality of the Universal Resolver, talk about the communities that are building and using it, and discuss how it provides a core building block for other efforts in the self-sovereign identity community.

Universal Resolver: https://github.com/decentralized-identity/universal-resolver/
Article: https://medium.com/decentralized-identity/a-universal-resolver-for-self-sovereign-identifiers-48e6b4a5cc3c
Decentralized Identity Foundation: http://identity.foundation/

Key Takeaways:

• Learn about the current state of specification and implementation of Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs)
• Learn about the various DID types ("methods") such as Sovrin, Bitcoin, Blockstack, uPort, Veres One, and understand how they differ and what all DIDs have in common
• Understand registration and resolution processes of DIDs
• Understand how DIDs fit in with higher-level technologies such as Verifiable Credentials
• Understand the role and activities of the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF), World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and other communities

Distributed ledgers and self-sovereign identity are a match made in heaven, and there are many products out there already that implement this concept readily available to developers and consumers alike.

After integrating with some of these providers, both manually and using client libraries, it’s clear that there’s a high variance in implementation quality, but at the same time some commonality in design decisions.

In this talk, we’re going to take a look at some of the common functionality of these providers, what they’re getting wrong from an integrator's perspective, and what we can learn from them moving forward.