Adopting the Multihash spec as a work item?

Hi all (bcc: Protocol Labs Research Division),

The Multihash specification was drafted before/during the last RWoT and
has been released as an IETF Internet-Draft. The specification is
intended to be a joint work product of Protocol Labs (IPFS and
Filecoin), the W3C Digital Verification Community Group, and the W3C
Credentials Community Group... which means we need to decide if we're
adopting it as a Work Item in the CCG.

So, what problem does Multihash solve and why do we care?

Our community depends on cryptographic hashes to generate short
fingerprints for files and data. These fingerprints look like this as
binary data:

0x0a4ec6f1629e49262d7093e2f82a3278

While that may look like gobbledygook to a human reader, it's enough for
a computer to uniquely identify, for example, one picture among all of
the other trillions of pictures on the Web. We use these fingerprints
when working with Verifiable Credentials, DIDs, public keys, and
evidence data (images, PDFs, etc.) that are linked to VCs.

The problem is that we don't know what sort of cryptographic hash
function generated the hash above, so we need to put an identifier at
the front of that cryptographic hash. That's basically what Multihash
does: it provides a mechanism to identify how cryptographic hashes were
generated.

This is useful because if we have a cryptographic hash identifier, we
can design upgradability into the systems we're building today.
Cryptographic hashing systems are broken every 10 years or so -- they
have a shelf life and will eventually need to be upgraded. Building this
concept of upgradability into our systems, especially DIDs and VCs, is a
good engineering practice and the Multihash spec enables us to do just
that. It's a fairly short 10 page spec and can be found here:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-multiformats-multihash-00

This email is a request to the Chairs to add this to the next meeting
Agenda for the CCG and adopt it as a work item.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Veres One Decentralized Identifier Blockchain Launches
https://tinyurl.com/veres-one-launches

Received on Tuesday, 1 January 2019 18:01:35 UTC