[MINUTES] W3C Credentials CG Call - 2021-01-27 12pm ET

Thanks to Dave Longley for scribing this week! The minutes
for this week's Credentials CG telecon are now available:

https://w3c-ccg.github.io/meetings/2021-01-27 

Full text of the discussion follows for W3C archival purposes.
Audio from the meeting is available as well (link provided below).

----------------------------------------------------------------
Credentials CG Telecon Minutes for 2021-01-27

Agenda:
  https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-credentials/2021Jan/0061.html
Topics:
  1. Introductions
  2. Work Item Process
  3. Discussion on VC Interactions & Data Models
Organizer:
  Wayne Chang and Kim Hamilton Duffy and Heather Vescent
Scribe:
  Dave Longley
Present:
  Joe Andrieu, Manu Sporny, Brian Munz, Juan Caballero, Gabe Cohen, 
  Dave Longley, Heather Vescent, Dmitri Zagidulin, Wayne Chang, Ted 
  Thibodeau, Tim Holborn, Daniel Buchner, Kaliya Young, Ryan Grant, 
  Adrian Gropper, Liam Broza
Audio:
  https://w3c-ccg.github.io/meetings/2021-01-27/audio.ogg

<dlongley> scribe+
Dave Longley is scribing.

Topic: Introductions

Wayne Chang:  Is there anyone new on the call that would like to 
  introduce?
Leo: I work at Work Day. I'm here in a supporting role.
Kasey: I'm on the same Workday team. Here to see Gabe's 
  presentation and the discussion that follows.
Tim Holborn:  I'm not usually on this call, I'm here from 
  Microsoft to listen to Gabe.
Daniel Buchner:  Also from Workday, here to support Gabe and 
  looking forward to his presentation.
Gabe Cohen:  I'm here to support myself. I used to be at Workday 
  but now I'm not.
Wayne Chang:  Thanks for being here, we're happy to support your 
  contributions.
Kaliya Young:  I'm now at the Covid Credentials Initiative. Along 
  with John Walker and Lucy Wang. Anyone interested in VCs we're 
  interested too. I'll be posting a link for subscribing to a 
  newsletter around this and this community.
Wayne Chang:  The only announcement coming is the Thoughtful 
  Biometrics Workshop, link...
Kaliya Young:  It's moved to March 8th, 10th, and 12th.
Kaliya Young: https://newsletter.identosphere.net/
Wayne Chang:  Any other announcements?
Juan Caballero: 
  https://medium.com/@decentralized.identity/89e78cb80f54
Wayne Chang:  The DIF F2F happened last Tuesday, it would be 
  great to get someone to report out on a future call. If anyone is 
  interested in doing that please email the list, the chairs would 
  be very interested.
Juan Caballero: ^DIF F2F highlights :D
Wayne Chang: 
  https://github.com/w3c-ccg/community/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3A%22action%3A+review+next%22
Wayne Chang:  We're not going to spend too much time on issue 
  discussion, but there are a few things to spend time on, 
  elections, infrastructure task force kick off, charter 
  amendments.
Wayne Chang:  Link in IRC for these issues. Because there are so 
  many issues, one of the issues we decided we can handle so many 
  issues is because some are related to outstanding PRs.
Wayne Chang:  We can start with the ones related to the work item 
  process, we have made recent updates to those. Heather, could you 
  talk about some of those issues? Best practices, work items, code 
  of conduct, etc.?

Topic: Work Item Process

Heather Vescent: https://w3c-ccg.github.io/workitem-process/
Heather Vescent:  Yeah, I don't think we need to go over each of 
  them individually because we've reviewed them multiple times in 
  the past. I did update the work item process and I will put the 
  link in the jitsi chat.
Heather Vescent:  Right now it says edits for review, because I 
  wanted a visual notification that these edits were happening. 
  After this meeting if there are no...
Heather Vescent:  Objections then I'll change the title.
Heather Vescent:  All of these issues are related. I can go over 
  what these edits are. Under section 2, terminology task force, 
  there was no task force category. We added that as a 
  category/work item.
Heather Vescent:  To 212, this is additional CCG requirements, 
  these are requirements that this CG has for work items.
Heather Vescent: https://w3c-ccg.github.io/workitem-process/
Heather Vescent:  Going 212, additional requirements, we added a 
  link to the W3C code of ethics. That addresses the concerns that 
  were in 169.
Heather Vescent:  We also added "address the work item questions 
  below". We put them here. For item 215 we added work item best 
  practices, that's also 174. Other questions are 173. The best 
  practices for running a work item ... if anyone has good best 
  practices they want to share about managing or running a work 
  item that would be good to put that here to help everyone.
Heather Vescent:  After 212 I put the work item category and in 
  the third category I added text about the task force 
  requirements. It's supposed to have the charter in here too but 
  I'm not sure what happened. A previous edit that had a request 
  for the charter.
Heather Vescent:  Which addresses 172 that somehow got deleted 
  during the PR. I thought I had that. Anyway, under the task force 
  requirements they must have a leader and a charter.
Heather Vescent:  For the task force to remain active it must 
  provide a status update.
Heather Vescent:  The initial idea was that task forces need to 
  give updates to the chairs on an ongoing basis, but we don't want 
  to make it overly burdensome on either the chairs or the task 
  force.
Heather Vescent:  We wanted to have a way that that task forces 
  -- where they aren't active that we can close them out.
Heather Vescent:  I think everything else is pretty much the 
  same.
Juan Caballero: +1
Manu Sporny:  Just to say thank you, this is really awesome to 
  see everything documented so well. It's been something we've been 
  needing to do as a community for a long time, so thanks to 
  Heather, Wayne, and Kim.
Wayne Chang:  Credit where it's due, Kim did the prototype 
  document, Heather contributed, so did TallTed and others, thank 
  yuo.
S/yuo/you/
Heather Vescent:  I'll close out these action items except the 
  one and we'll touch base on that next time we talk.
Wayne Chang:  Anyone can comment on a closed issue if you think 
  it should be reopened.
Wayne Chang:  Next time is proposed infrastructure task force 
  item -- it looks like there are no objections here and we can 
  move forward. We're going to start with low stakes items.
Wayne Chang:  If you want the history there you can read that, 
  it's been approved by the chairs, you can expect an email if you 
  are interested in participating in the kick off, about 2 weeks 
  out, then it will pick up steam from there.
Wayne Chang:  158 -- CCG work item templates as github templates. 
  With the closing out of the other issues we can use these 
  templates to make things more convenient for everyone. Status 
  update on the recommended CCG license, we need to ensure that all 
  the repos have the updated licenses for IPR reasons. We've been 
  working with Wendy Seltzer from W3C management on this.
Wayne Chang:  We are just waiting on a few repos that haven't 
  updated the license on that.
Heather Vescent: https://github.com/w3c-ccg/community/issues/142
Heather Vescent:  I manually changed all these. If you look at 
  the issue. I would love, since we're on the call, I'd like to 
  look at this. Three comments from the top -- I have a list of 
  links, these are the 5 repos that currently do not adhere to the 
  CCG license. My question is, do we need to have them adhere to 
  the CCG license and are there any objections to changing them to 
  the CCG license?
Heather Vescent:  These are called out because they listed a 
  different license.
Heather Vescent:  If you know about these, please advise.
Manu Sporny:  I know of at least 4 of them. The DID test suite 
  should be shutdown, redirected, and can change to the CCG 
  license. I think switching to the CCG license applies to 
  everything except the sovrin one.
Manu Sporny:  So DID test suite, LD merkleproof, other LD ones, 
  only the sovrin one I don't know about.
Manu Sporny:  Can all have the new license.
Ted Thibodeau: I think this is the "20 days ago" comment?  
  https://github.com/w3c-ccg/community/issues/142#issuecomment-756380871
<tallted> (direct links to comments hide under their timestamp)
Manu Sporny:  Orie is the official keeper of the DID test suite. 
  It's in the official W3C DID WG at this point and we need to say 
  it's in an official WG now and we just link to it and then close 
  it.
Heather Vescent:  And then we switch to the CCG license?
Juan Caballero: https://github.com/w3c/did-test-suite
Manu Sporny:  Yes, just switch to the new CCG, then say it's 
  moved to the DID WG, then archive the repo, in that order.
Wayne Chang:  Ok, great.
<heathervescent> Thank Manu
Wayne Chang:  We can continue the discussion over there and we 
  can check with Wendy on doing that.
Wayne Chang:  The Sovrin repo we can actually archive, I got 
  confirmation from the contributors that it can be archived, it's 
  way out dated.
Wayne Chang: https://github.com/w3c-ccg/community/issues/136
Wayne Chang:  Long discussion, we wanted membership criteria and 
  a lot of people decided it might be too onerous to have 
  membership requirements for voting. To summarize some of the 
  issues we had in the first election -- we're trying to improve 
  the process. A link was shared with the changes and I emailed the 
  mailing list and called for strong objections.
Wayne Chang:  The only outstanding discussion point is that the 
  membership requirements may be too constraining. The other issue 
  was about using ranked choice voting (we are using it in the new 
  charter and no objections thus far).
Wayne Chang:  It seems that the discussion between Joe and Kim is 
  leaning toward just being a member of the community group and 
  signing the contributor agreement.
Heather Vescent:  My concern here is that the comments that were 
  initially documented by Christopher Allen are like anonymous and 
  then the rest of the comments on here are not anonymous and those 
  go against those comments. I don't think I have a good 
  understanding of what the community wants. I'm not sure what 
  people want because the comments are in conflict. I don't know 
  who those anonymous comments were from.
Heather Vescent:  We made the changes based on those anonymous 
  comments and now we've gotten push back on it and I haven't heard 
  from those anonymous people with their concerns not being 
  addressed.
Wayne Chang:  Joe, if you're able to discuss -- we're considering 
  your recommendation of removing the membership requirements.
Manu Sporny:  I didn't quite understand what question is being 
  asked. I'm not sure are you saying -- open debate on the topic?
Manu Sporny:  I think we should just trust the community, I don't 
  think anyone has abused the voting process. If you agree to the 
  contributer agreement you can vote.
Manu Sporny:  When it comes to process and taking anonymous input 
  into account is super dangerous. I don't think we should take 
  anonymous input into account unless it's fairly benign.
Wayne Chang:  That's a fair point. The question is -- does anyone 
  want to talk to this?
Joe Andrieu:  The idea here is that the chairs propose something 
  and that's adopted if no objections it's accepted OR if there are 
  objections we discuss and see if those are easily resolved or we 
  can go to the larger community if not.
Joe Andrieu:  I don't think we can consider anonymous comments as 
  a principled objection.
Wayne Chang:  Those are fair points. They weren't only just 
  anonymous comments, for example, Dan Burnett for example was a 
  large supporter of meeting attendance for membership, or that was 
  my interpretation.
Ryan Grant: +1 Asking for pointer to anon comments.
Heather Vescent:  Thank you everyone for this conversation, my 
  question was "do we ignore the anonymous comments?" and the 
  answer is "yes". I say we explicitly say that and then we move 
  forward.
Joe Andrieu: +1
Heather Vescent:  I wasn't comfortable without a resolution on 
  how to handle the anonymous comments and we have one now.
Wayne Chang:  Yes, and I'm on the side of trusting the community 
  here as well, so no extra requirements.
Heather Vescent:  So does that mean you'll make an edit of this 
  and once you send this to the list we'll start the 2 weeks?
Wayne Chang:  No, I think if we get rid of the objections it 
  should be fine.
Heather Vescent:  Prior to the 2 weeks?
Wayne Chang:  Yeah.
Heather Vescent:  Once resolved I'll put together the election 
  timeline.
Wayne Chang:  I think 2021 will be a big year for the CG, 
  expecting even more growth.
Wayne Chang:  It's important that we have a good fundamental 
  process for elections, work items, task forces, etc. So anyone 
  can step up and take on the chair role.

Topic: Discussion on VC Interactions & Data Models

Wayne Chang:  Moving on, we have a bunch of people from the 
  mailing list discussing extensions to the VC spec. That was 
  kicked off by Gabe who worked at Workday at the time, has since 
  transitioned. We are happy to have him and others here to talk 
  about verifiable requests.
Wayne Chang:  Gabe, you started off the thread here, could you 
  take 2-5 minutes to set the context here.
Gabe Cohen: 
  https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/16pcCj1VtJ0r2OcLM1GznpDreWSgedeBAB8lZtLlkIYM/edit?usp=sharing
Wayne Chang:  About why you sent the email to the list, 
  summarize, recommendations.
Gabe Cohen:  The VC data model defines claims, presentations; I 
  was thinking about why there was no opposite for presentations, 
  nothing for requests. You're often responding to a request, maybe 
  not always.
Gabe Cohen:  If the VC spec is the right place to define the 
  presentation, it could also define the request without too many 
  changes.
Gabe Cohen:  The VC doesn't need to or want to define a protocol, 
  that's understood. What I'm most interested in is a common data 
  model to request VCs in a common manner. It will be created in 
  numerous places and different ways if there is no standard.
Gabe Cohen:  Defining what the request looks like is not 
  necessary, but the wrapping for a request could be worth while.
Gabe Cohen:  I'd like to create a VerifiableRequest and 
  standardize that. The idea is that there is some meta data about 
  the request(s) and the proofs from the requester to authenticate 
  the request.
Gabe Cohen:  I modified the example in the spec to show what it 
  would be like.
Gabe Cohen:  Brief Pros and Cons, probably didn't cover the Cons 
  as well as I could have. I want to avoid multiple formats for 
  requests. Adding a data model would add value for the community. 
  I think it's important to verify the authenticity of the request 
  to be able to confidently respond.
Gabe Cohen:  The cons could be that the spec is hinting a 
  protocol without declaring one. We could be really clear about 
  indicating there's no protocol, just a data model.
Gabe Cohen:  Daniel Hardman mentioned that authenticity of a 
  request is normally not needed or handled in other ways.
Gabe Cohen:  You'll notice in this example that there's no 
  standard for a request.
Gabe Cohen:  There are options I've enumerated, I think it's a 
  good idea, it should belong in this spec, or it's a bad idea.
Gabe Cohen:  Or if you think maybe we should remove 
  VerifiablePresentations from the spec.
Wayne Chang:  This is a really good candidate for a work item and 
  take your examples and verbiage around VRs and see how it would 
  work. See if there are other work items where it could be put as 
  well. Once more refined as a work item, we could decided as a 
  group whether it should be in the spec or not.
Manu Sporny:  +1 To Gabe, this is great. Absolutely we need a 
  request format. We probably need more than 1 unfortunately. Let 
  me go back to what was in the VC WG's mind when we put the spec 
  into shape it was in. We were getting pretty big objections to 
  working on a protocol. So we worked on a data model only because 
  of that pressure.
Manu Sporny:  Large W3C member companies saying don't do a 
  protocol yet. So that's why.
Manu Sporny:  We know that we will need to a protocol at some 
  point, we don't know what the query mechanism will be yet, we 
  wanted to give time for multiple options to form in the market. 
  One of those options is CHAPI (Credential Handler API), it has a 
  query-by-example model. There's another that the Aries community 
  uses. Your proposing one now as well.
Manu Sporny:  That's all good, we predicted that there would be 
  multiple different query mechanisms and it would be ideal to have 
  just 1 but it's not yet clear how to combine everything and keep 
  it simple.
Manu Sporny:  There's the ZKP mechanism, OIDC/SIOP, query by 
  example.
Manu Sporny:  Totally agree with you, we need to define this, 
  there is interoperability work going on in the DHS SVIP program 
  and also people implementing things in Aries and we should make 
  sure things are aligned.
Manu Sporny:  We're going to need to have one or more work items 
  and figure this out or we won't get to interop.
Gabe Cohen:  I agree with you, Manu. There need to be a number of 
  these different options. I'm thinking about it from the 
  perspective, I'm using VPs for my responses, what should I use 
  for my requests? For Aries they use VPs to respond, but for the 
  request they have nothing.
Gabe Cohen:  So someone wanting to use VPs -- there should be a 
  VR.
Adrian Gropper:  I have almost 10 years of experience and 
  implementation experience around request and authorization 
  protocols. As they are used in the real world. I have moved my 
  attention to the GNAP work that's in IETF. I don't represent a 
  huge economic interest here but represent the community. I think 
  we should align the data model work around the GNAP protocols 
  going forward.
Adrian Gropper:  It makes the level of sophistication is 
  unmatched in this particular domain -- and we'll be reinventing a 
  number of wheels over 5 years or more if we don't consider that 
  work.
<dmitriz> @manu - have we brought up the vp-request-spec spec?
<liam_mccarty> Audio isn't working sorry
Dave Longley:  Doing requests on CHAPI -- CHAPI accepts ay data 
  format that can use JSON. We have a work item around defining a 
  number of these formats. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Dave Longley:  You can ask for different credential types, 
  properties claims inside of VCs that you are interested in 
  receiving. In addiiton you can specifiy types of issuers you 
  trust, types of credentials that issuers would hold. It's a 
  powerful mechanism for composing a request around the type of 
  thing you would like to see. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Dave Longley:  There is already a work item that Digital Bazaar 
  and Secure Key have been working on where this work might land. 
  [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Gabe Cohen:  So I was thinking about requests more as a noun than 
  a verb. How do you know that what's being requested is actually 
  correct? More like you're signing a request "what credentials are 
  being asked for"? That, to me is independent of protocol. The 
  goal is more is about ensuring that what's being requested for is 
  cryptographically verifiable.
Dmitri Zagidulin: https://w3c-ccg.github.io/vp-request-spec/
Manu Sporny:  There are classes of requests where you want them 
  to be signed and others where it doesn't matter or not. The 
  query-by-example mechanism could be digitally signed, for 
  example. I'm not sure where the signature is needed, but there 
  are mechanisms for it, there are often other trust signals.
<dmitriz> ^ data model spec of the 'query-by-example' method manu 
  is talking about
Manu Sporny:  Thinking about as a data model vs. a protocol is a 
  good thing to do. These are data model things that can travel 
  over different protocols, but how you ask for information is a 
  data model solution, not a protocol, that's a good way to think 
  about it.
Dmitri Zagidulin:  I wanted to +1 Adrian's comments about GNAP, 
  that is an excellent protocol. In the SDS group we'd also 
  investigating using GNAP for authorization.
Dmitri Zagidulin:  But, specifically, GNAP is very much data 
  model agnostic, so I would highly encourage considering GNAP as a 
  protocol in conjunction with data models from the VP request spec 
  work item and the proposal from Workday/Gabe.
Dmitri Zagidulin:  GNAP is a pretty decent protocol, we need a 
  data model to use it.
Gabe Cohen:  Now that we have this agreement that the data model 
  is important, where is the best place to add it? Here or 
  somewhere else? Who can assist in that process?
Manu Sporny:  Absolutely, the CCG is the right place to work on 
  it. Primarily, you'd expect it to go into a W3C WG and it's 
  aligned with the VC spec. It's a separate work item, it's its own 
  world and has a lot of things to consider that are different from 
  what's in the VC spec. There's more leeway that way. If it 
  becomes clear that it should be part of the core spec we can do 
  that, but don't do it too early, could create artificial 
  boundaries.
Liam Broza:  I would love to hear from you, Manu about the 
  asymmetry. Presentations may contain data that's derived from 
  VCs, not the VCs themselves. What's the history? What was the 
  motivation for including VPs?
Manu Sporny:  Two pressures: Large companies telling us not to a 
  protocol and the other reason for no VRs in the spec is different 
  ways of doing it. Not alignment yet, no single way to do it 
  (premature). Those are the two reasons, pressure to not do a 
  protocol and no single way to do it yet.
Manu Sporny:  There's a desire to work on it, so we should work 
  on it.
Wayne Chang:  CCG has a relationship with the VC Maintenance WG, 
  because it's in maintenance mode it might be a hurdle to add 
  breaking changes to a spec, that's one thing to consider. But a 
  work item is a great way to consider the ecosystem wants to move 
  forward.
Joe Andrieu:  In addition to the notes Manu suggested, part of 
  where VP came from, lacking a protocol, we didn't have a way to 
  prove a VC is under control of the person presenting it. So when 
  you, for example, give your driver's license to someone we also 
  have the assertion "this is mine" in the presentation.
Wayne Chang:  Whether we sign something or not has to do with 
  non-repudiation. A digital signature plays a piece in that 
  overall puzzle, there's an opportunity to talk about how 
  non-repudiation effects things here.
Adrian Gropper: 
  https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/11/03/2020-24283/request-for-comments-on-federal-information-processing-standard-fips-201-3
Liam Broza:  Thanks both of you, that's very helpful. Things like 
  phishing, is a very important concern.
Liam Broza:  Some of the privacy concerns that are highlighted in 
  the spec, the use cases people are focused on ... are less 
  important to our work we're concerned about security more than 
  correlation.
Adrian Gropper:  There's an update to the NIST specification 
  processes and so on that's quite valuable in this context. The 
  commentary is over on Monday, I haven't figured out what I'll 
  comment on yet, if anything, but quite worthwhile, state of the 
  art.
<wayne> scribe+
Dave Longley:  Regarding the phishing concerns, some of that 
  might fall under the protocol layer. For example, if you're using 
  CHAPI to ship your credentials, then you're getting signals 
  directly from the browser around which party you're talking with. 
  There might be a place for this kind of authentication in the 
  data model _or_ the protocol, which allows user familiarity. 
  [scribe assist by Wayne Chang]
Dave Longley:  It may be tricky to figure out when we should be 
  using authentication in the request, and when the protocol should 
  handle that. If we introduce the option in both places, we need 
  some guardrails to advise the user when to use which. [scribe 
  assist by Wayne Chang]
Gabe Cohen: https://github.com/w3c-ccg/community/issues/179
Gabe Cohen:  I just opened up an issue for the work item.
Wayne Chang:  Thanks to all and to the scribe! See everyone next 
  week.
<wayne_chang> kicking everyone soon to shut down the bot. please 
  don't take it personally :)
Heather Vescent: +1

Received on Wednesday, 10 February 2021 23:03:30 UTC