Distributed Identity (DI) presents an interesting paradigm for the T&I NREN community. Its concepts are very appealing and align well with public values in our community. At the same time many of the technical and functional properties are still in development and present numerous questions and challenges, as was shown in recent work in NRENs and in the Incubator.

The activity proposed builds on earlier work and investigates the following aspects of DI:

1. What roles could/should GEANT and NRENs play in a DI ecosystem, and what are the associated benefits, challenges and risks?

2. Which current services in the GEANT portfolio would benefit from the use of DI, and what would that look like?

3. To what extent can existing initiatives implementing distributed ledgers technology be used to act as a Verifyable Data Registry to satisfy the above use cases and requirements? We should test with for example EBSI, etherium or Sovrin. How do these compare to the IRMA solution we previously tested. (IRMA does not use DLT).

4. Initial testing with IRMA revealed a wallet based approach may not always provide an optimal user experience. What requirements do we have for the User interface (wallet/app) and can we implement or mock these to test these requirements with stakeholders.

As described in the Activity overview, this activity has mutiple goals:

1. Deliver a report on what roles could/should GEANT and NRENs play in a DI ecosystem, and what are the associated benefits, challenges and risks?
2. Deliver a report on which current services in the GEANT portfolio would benefit from the use of DI, and what would that look like? This task also investigates associated benefits, challenges and risks and the business case. What value would this potentially bring to the constituency?
3. Deliver a proof of concept where we implement Distributed Identity technology using a distributed ledger. Preferably we make use of EBSI, the European Blockchain Service Initiative.
4. Until now the use-cases tested have focused on straightforward scenarios where a simple set of attributes was released towards services. In this subtask we investigate and describe how to use DI in complex scenarios. In previous work we found that releasing larger sets of attributes does not work well due to GUI limitations. We deliver a whitepaper and a proof of concept implementation on how we can optimize user experience and implementation into existing services. To this end we may implement improvements into IRMA (in collaboration w/ IRMA), describe and test if common patterns like API access may assist in this process.

• Conduct interviews with stakeholders
• Describe report based on use cases

This activity is still ongoing

Sprint demo:  TII Public Demo 5.3 Feb 2022.pdf

Presentation at TF-DLT: Self Sovereign Identity use cases.pdf