Bloom donates WACI to the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF)

Bloom makes its first donation to the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF), Claims and Credentials Working Group

The DIF and Working Groups

The DIF is a Joint Development Foundation project that facilitates IPR-protected co-development among large and small industry players in the decentralized identity space. It produces open-source code, pre-standard specifications, market collaboration, and non-technical documentation.

Working Groups (WG) are at the core of DIF. These groups are scoped by functional areas and are designed to drive emerging standard specifications backed up by open-source code.

Bloom is a member of the Claims and Credentials WG, which focuses on standards and technology that create, exchange, and verify claims and credentials in a decentralized identity ecosystem. The Claims and Credentials WG  hosts specifications for projects like the Presentation Exchange and Credential Manifest. Although these specifications outline the data models for requesting and issuing Claims, they don't specify how the data is sent between the holder and issuer/verifier. Enter WACI!

Wallet And Credential Interactions (WACI)

WACI was introduced at the annual IIW32 Workshop  with a very warm response. Its goal is to specify how interactions between a wallet and Relying Party (RP) such as an issuer or a verifier happen. At its core, WACI is a handshake of JWTs, where the RP signs a JWT that is given to the wallet, and the wallet signs another JWT containing the initial token as a "challenge" claim. This allows the wallet to prove ownership of its DID.

The easiest way to see the benefit of WACI is to offer a way to log into an application without a password with Verified Credential (VC) based authentication that cannot be faked.

A picture (demo video in our case) is worth a thousand words:

Next Steps for Bloom and C&C WG

• Achieve v1 release of WACI-Presentation-Exchange specification
• Fold back in lessons and extensions from #1 and then flush out remaining sections to achieve v1 feature-completeness for v1 of the WACI specification and sample implementation
• Register a custom URI schema (waci://)