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Tuesday, October 25
Agenda:
- Report writing – Sovrin Foundation questionnaire answers discussion
Attending: Eve, Thomas, Matisse, Kathleen, SteveO, Thorsten
Meeting logistics: Just a reminder: No meeting this Thursday. Also, when we take up meeting again next week, UK and Europe clocks will have changed, but US clocks won't have, and US Pacific is our normative time zone (see timeanddate.com for "summertime skew" details...). Please keep an eye on and/or subscribe to our calendar!
New book: Don't miss Thomas's new book, called Trust::Data: A New Framework for Identity and Data sharing! Wow. Congratulations!
Sovrin answers: You can find them in your inbox or in the email archive. See also the paper Thorsten mentioned in email.
Overall, Eve's question for each use case, differentially, is: How much does limiting the risk of a "pure public blockchain technology" approach impact the goals of the use case, and particularly in our case where the use case goals are for empowerment? E.g., for some fintech use case where you want to speed up business and protect against legal risk, maybe limiting the "distributedness" of the blockchain to your enterprise – that is, inside your firewall – could be fine. But for other use cases, that could seriously harm you goal. So for today, given that Sovrin has a goal of self-sovereign identity, have they been able to successfully mitigate risk while enjoying/providing the benefits of blockchain ("walked the line correctly")?
"Self-sovereign identity" sounds like an extension of the previous notion of "user-centric identity".
Thomas's CoreID paper caused some people to accuse him of being a communist 
for proposing a blockchain identity system that enables anonymous credentials. Eve's question is: What ecosystem that involves both individuals and services could function without at least some (probably the lion's share of) use cases of identified sharing?
There are some "anonymous authorization" (Shibboleth) and "claims-based access control" (UMA) use cases, indeed. (And notice that these use cases didn't require blockchain to be solved) But quite often, (empowered) service operators do need to know who they're dealing with among (currently disempowered) individuals. See Latanya Sweeney's research on the ability to re-correlate individuals from a few attributes; hence Eve's skepticism about ZKP approaches (which Sovrin criticizes as well). Users also have real incentives to share data with services in many cases because otherwise the services can't function.
Are there any services accepting Sovrin credentials yet? These are apparently called "stewards".
We looked at the Technical Foundations paper. The observer/validator/governance paradigm seems well thought out. Thomas noted that the widening circles of nodes looks like what Ripple has. The governance model could perhaps be a model/template for other use cases as well.
Not depending on IdPs sounds like a big benefit. People have been become persona non grata on various services that function as IdPs (such as being shadowbanned or outright banned on Twitter), or have been monitored by government IdPs. However, the reality of many service providers is that they rely heavily on these 30 social IdPs for a lot of what they do, both the user population and the information provided by these service sources. ("Social login" is when they rely totally on the incoming IdP for information, and "social registration" is when they explicitly collect additional information and do separate login thereafter.) What is the value proposition for these RPs?
Also, how would legacy "federated SSO" work (a la SAML or OIDC) in this new world?
AI: Everyone please continue to review the questionnaire answers (two sections left to go) and provide thoughts in email. We can send our questions to the Sovrin folks after our review is complete.
Tuesday, October 18
Attendees: ScottS, Kathleen, Matisse, Thomas, JohnW
AIs for Report:
- Text from contributors
- Terminology and definitions
Report to dos:
Kathleen working on HL7. Jim Hazard has been talking in UMA legal, with many similarities with FHIR work. Question is what will the Smart Contract look like, what will it do. Adrian also writing up text.
Kathleen: reach out to Jim for text. Also Adrian has text from the ONC Blockchain Challenge.
Thomas: anything missing from the Report? Kathleen: need a definition of SC. Scott: yes, we’re not quite there. Also expand to a list/taxonomy of definitions and terminologies for the report.
Potential Liaisons: groups that members of BSC are involved and list of relevant orgs looking at SC
- HL7
- GA4GH: Global Alliance four Genomic Health
- CommonAccord
- GTRI: Georgia Tech Research Institute
- OTTO: Open Trust Taxonomy for OAuth
- Federated Authorization
- Smart Contracts Alliance
- Kantara’s liaison with JTC1/ISO (Identity Assurance & Management)
- UMA WG
- CIS WG
- New ISO group on blockchains (ISO TC307)
- Sovrin
- JLINC protocol – JSON-LD may be used for SC.
- BlockchainCanada.org
AI: Thomas: start email thread on definition of SC.
Thursday, October 13
Agenda:
- Report writing
Attending: Colin, Adrian, Marc, Thomas., Jim Hazard, Kathleen,
Went through the bulleted list from Adrian. Thomas: this list of also what is needed for Smart Contracts (e.g. subject, user, resources, etc). A smart contract has identities of originator, destination (counter-party), dates/durations, conditions (which may depend on external data sources - resources), agreed set of data-feeds (resources), source-authenticity of the data-feeds/sources, even perhaps agreed nodes/platforms to execute the contract, etc.
Adrian: Using a blockchain tech, you can create a UMA without federation. So it becomes a "federation-free" to perform transactions involving personal data.User is running the UMA-AS and signing contracts with hospitals. The contract control how hospital A shared my data with hospital B. Adrian's assumption is that the AS is a user-owner resource. Two types of contracts: first contract is the registers a resource that has my data with my AS (delegation of authZ). The second contract is the Hospital A and B.
Adrian's maps the world in 2 phases capturing the 2 constructions of contracts. The first contract is telling the institution "here is my AS and resources under the control of my AS" (bilateral or trilateral).
Kathleen: text sent to Eve/Scott for pre-review. HL7 has based its work on foundation standards (e.g. access control; privacy; policies, etc). Examples: ISO/IEC 10181. How to use attributes to make access control decisions (e.g. RBAC). Agreements on security and privacy policies. Not a full trust framework, but more on federated authentication: how 2 or more domains establish trust. How to expand from narrow to wide ecosystem: how to move away from centralized model to a direct trust model (e.g. using Stellar consensus model). How to express this trust in smart-contracts. So that if data "falls-off" or "escapes" that you can no longer use that data. How does the RP check claims etc in a direct (non-centralized) model.
Adrian: important to express difference between the federated model vs the blockchain model. The Federated model is able to get hospital A and B to share data about User without immediate consent from the User. Adrian thinks we need 2 contracts. Here is the UMA-AS is acting as the agent of the RO (resource owner). The RO does not need to be present 24x7. The issues: are the policies visible to external entities. In Adrian's case, the policies are never visible.
Kathleen: in this case, the AS will honor whoever is able to prove trust. So the 2 models are compatible. The access policies are not necessarily visible.
Jim: we need to separate "smart contracts" from blockchains".
Adrian: how can we start a SC withiout placing the policies (driving the SC) into the public domain. Policies means the riles of access: If I'm Alice and I don't want share my rules/policies (about accessing my resources), how to do this in SC? In the UMA case, the rules/policies are in the UMA-AS.
Jim: an SC does not need to public. In this case, Bob could take a shot and see if it works.
Adrian: there are lots of similarities between SC and UMA. Jim: the SC record codifies the legal text and executable. Thomas: yes there should be commonalities between UMA-AS and SC/Blockchains. SC has "if-then-else" which are like rules of access in UMA for AS, RO and requesting party. A node could in fact add UMA-AS capabilities.
Kathleen: for the BSC report, we need to express some kind of "future roadmap" on how to get from here to there. Thomas: may be suggest some recommendation points.
Marc: need a development methodology, just Jim/thomas paper at W3C blockchain conference in May: https://www.w3.org/2016/04/blockchain-workshop/interest/hazard-hardjono.html. People in France are also struggling on how to get from current legal model to SC in the future.
Thursday, October 6
Agenda:
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