[MINUTES] W3C CCG Credentials CG Call - 2024-12-11

Thanks to Our Robot Overlords for scribing this week!

The transcript for the call is now available here:

https://w3c-ccg.github.io/meetings/2024-12-11/

Full text of the discussion follows for W3C archival purposes.
Audio of the meeting is available at the following location:

https://w3c-ccg.github.io/meetings/2024-12-11/audio.ogg

A video recording is also available at:

https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/archives/w3c-ccg-weekly-2024-12-11.mp4

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W3C CCG Weekly Teleconference Transcript for 2024-12-11

Agenda:
  https://www.w3.org/Search/Mail/Public/advanced_search?hdr-1-name=subject&hdr-1-query=%5BAGENDA&period_month=Dec&period_year=2024&index-grp=Public__FULL&index-type=t&type-index=public-credentials&resultsperpage=20&sortby=date
Organizer:
  Harrison Tang, Kimberly Linson, Will Abramson
Scribe:
  Our Robot Overlords
Present:
  Christopher Allen, Harrison Tang, Alan Karp, Mahmoud Alkhraishi, 
  Vanessa, Greg Bernstein, Tim Bouma, Manu Sporny, cc, TallTed // 
  Ted Thibodeau (he/him) (OpenLinkSw.com), Will Abramson, Nis 
  Jespersen , Tom S, Jeff O / HumanOS, Joe Andrieu, Geun-Hyung, 
  Erica Connell, Alberto Leon, Phil Long, Alberto Leon(BKC at 
  Harvard), Benjamin Young

Our Robot Overlords are scribing.
Harrison_Tang: Good morning uh good morning everyone so welcome 
  to this week's w3c ctg uh meeting so today uh we're very excited 
  to have Krista Christopher Allen here to uh talk about Edge 
  identifiers and clicks uh but before that just want to go through 
  some administrative stuff and then also uh we are in the process 
  of the election of a new uh ccg culture role so I'll talk about 
  that a little bit later.
Harrison_Tang: Now I just want to quickly start with uh a 
  reminder on the code of ethics and professional conduct I just 
  want to make sure that we hold the constructive and respectful 
  conversations here.
Harrison_Tang: A quick note on the intellectual property anyone 
  can participate in these calls however all substance 
  contributions to any ccg work guidelines must be the member of 
  the ccg with 4 IP agreements signed so if you have any questions 
  in regards to uh getting a w3c account or the w3c community 
  contributor license agreement uh please feel free to reach out to 
  any of the cultures.
Harrison_Tang: Please note that these meetings are automatically 
  recorded and transcribed and we will publish the meeting minutes 
  and the audio and video recordings uh in the next day or 2.
Harrison_Tang: We use our GT chat to cue the speakers during the 
  call.
Harrison_Tang: Cost to take minutes so you can type in Q Plus to 
  add yourself to the queue or cue minus to remove.
Harrison_Tang: All right I just want to take a moment uh to uh 
  for the introductions and reintroduction so if you are new to the 
  community or you haven't been active and want to re-engage feel 
  free to just unmute and uh speak yourself.
Harrison_Tang: All right next announcements and reminders any uh 
  new announcements or reminders of the upcoming events.
Manu Sporny:  Um yeah uh just 1 uh heads up to the group um I'm 
  trying to find.
<harrison_tang> Add "Topic: <Edge Identifiers & Cliques>"
Manu Sporny:  Appropriate email um uh there is uh so we've done a 
  number of presentations on uh BBS in this group so it's a new 
  privacy preserving cryptography new as in 20 years old at this 
  point um but there's a big push to get it standardized at uh at 
  ITF um and uh uh.
Manu Sporny:  And so there's been a lot of discussion and work so 
  um Greg Bernstein's done a lot of presentations on BBS and how 
  it's useful for privacy preserving uh credentials uh work has 
  been going on at the internet engineering task force uh 
  specifically uh really in the crypto Forum research Group which 
  is where new types of cryptography tends to be standardized um in 
  their uh was repeated requests to.
Manu Sporny:  Adopt um uh these these specifications so BBS is 
  already adopted it has cryptographic review but there are 2 new 
  features that we're really looking for in a complete solution to 
  enable and linkable uh credentials uh and so the official call is 
  out now and it is only open until December 20th so it's a very 
  short period where you have to write in and uh signal your 
  support for the specification.
Manu Sporny:  Uh if you care about.
Manu Sporny: 
  https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/cfrg/H3LfT7mrelFnDUvJ3kL6CNev3C8/
Manu Sporny:  Privacy preserving cryptography uh and specifically 
  kind of the BBS stuff that we've been you know working on for 
  years here um this is an important uh Point um to go in and and 
  uh write in your support I put a link into the chat channel uh if 
  you go there and you respond to that email uh unfortunately you 
  do need to sign up for the CFR Gmail mailing list for your email 
  not to be bounced um if you responded that and say that you 
  supported adoption that's really all we're looking for now so 
  again if you'd like to see this type of privacy preserving 
  cryptography uh standardized and used and verifiable credentials 
  and dids and all that kind of stuff uh it is vital that you go 
  and um provide your support uh to the call for adoption that's 
  it.
Will Abramson:  Yeah I just wanted to ask my that's different to 
  like the past like I feel like I've already done that but like it 
  seems like this is a new thing.
Will Abramson:  Ah okay so this is more important yeah okay.
Manu Sporny:  I know it's confusing the the previous 1 was a 
  request that they start a call for adoption this 1 is the actual 
  call for adoption which is.
Manu Sporny:   Kind of ridiculous.
Manu Sporny:  You know whatever so please write in again 
  reaffirming that you would like the things adopted that's it.
Harrison_Tang:  any other.
<greg_bernstein> Thanks all from the BBS team!
Harrison_Tang: Announcements or reminders.
Harrison_Tang: Just a quick previous what's coming so uh next 
  Tuesday we'll have uh Isaac to uh give an update on the 
  verifiable issuers and verifiers and then we will be uh not have 
  we will not have to uh ccg meetings on December 24th and the 
  December 31st and we will resume on January 7th uh with.
Harrison_Tang: Presentation by JC.
Harrison_Tang: I will send out the email reminders as always.
Harrison_Tang: All right any uh last calls for the announcements 
  and reminders.
Harrison_Tang: All right so I just want to take a moment uh to 
  open up the to talk about the election of the w3c ccg culture 
  position so uh.
Harrison_Tang: So the nomination has closed and we have 2 
  candidates uh Jillian Walsh and Mammoth uh I'm not gonna butcher 
  his last name but we'll have 2 candidates uh and then I would 
  like to invite them to actually share a few words and then uh 
  right afterwards I'm going to send out uh an email uh to open up 
  the voting and then we will have we will have the about a week uh 
  to for for the voting to happen and we'll.
Harrison_Tang: So my mom do you want to uh just uh speak a few 
  words about your candidacy.
Mahmoud Alkhraishi:  Um hi my name is Muhammad Al keshi um over 
  the past few years I've had the pleasure of working with many if 
  not most of you.
Harrison_Tang: Thank you Mamou.
Mahmoud Alkhraishi:  And it has been a wonderful time uh I'm 
  looking to be the nominee for co-chair and to do that I would 
  love to be able to help push forward the ccg in a lot of the 
  different ways 1 of them is I've been very happy with the 
  diversity inclusion that's been going on I would like to increase 
  that there are a lot of changes that have been happening the last 
  8 months to a year in the ccg especially on how the topics are 
  picked especially on what kinds of things that are being talked 
  about these have been wonderful and I would like to keep pushing 
  that forward um I've worked with a lot of you on many things at 
  here at the VC working group at the did working group at ITF or 
  at Dak and I feel like I would be able to provide uh you know a 
  different perspective and I think that would be helpful thank 
  you.
Harrison_Tang: And I don't think I see uh joining here but I 
  think she has sent out an email about her around the issue so uh 
  you can just refer to her email.
Harrison_Tang: All right a quick note so I will send out an email 
  for the.
Harrison_Tang: Regards to how you can vote uh but uh I will just 
  quickly show what that voting interface look like so give me a 
  second.
Harrison_Tang: I think people people get to see my screen right.
Harrison_Tang: Cool all right so it is a rank Choice voting so 
  the we have 2 candidates here so it takes like about 30 seconds 
  to do it's really easy so just uh type in your name and email and 
  then you'll get to this screen and then you just uh do the rank 
  Choice and then that's it so.
Harrison_Tang: Let me see okay so the nomination uh has closed uh 
  the end of day yesterday so we will open up the voting uh I'll 
  send out the email right after this and then the voting will 
  close on the.
Harrison_Tang: Uh the end of the day next Monday and we'll 
  announce the election result uh during the ccg meeting next 
  Tuesday.
Harrison_Tang: And then the new culture term will start on 
  January 7th the new year.
Harrison_Tang: All right pretty straight forward um.
Harrison_Tang: All right before we get to the main agenda um any 
  last introductions reintroductions announcements or.
Harrison_Tang: Work item updates relay stuff.
Will Abramson:  Yes I will say something so we've I've been 
  working at it with my mood and a bunch of other people who are on 
  the traceability um.
Will Abramson: 
  https://www.w3.org/community/reports/credentials/CG-FINAL-traceability-interop-20241204/
Will Abramson:  I think it's like a task force right to publish a 
  final report I did mention this last time but we finally managed 
  to get them published so I guess you know we can celebrate that a 
  little bit I just dropped 2 links into the.
Will Abramson: 
  https://www.w3.org/community/reports/credentials/CG-FINAL-traceability-vocab-20241204/
Will Abramson:  Um documents like these are now like final w3c 
  official Community reports.
Will Abramson:  Maybe I'll ask my mood if I have to say anything 
  about the documents themselves but before that I just would 
  invite anybody if you're working on a report or if you have a 
  report that you think is a final Community report but hasn't got 
  this like official w3.org URL link yet like please reach out to 
  me and and I'll work with you to help get them to this sort of 
  more official stage.
Will Abramson:   So I think.
Will Abramson:  Get a proper you.
Will Abramson:  And we can put it on our community uh.
Will Abramson:  Stuff you know just mix things a bit more 
  official.
Will Abramson:  So I don't know I moved you on to speak a little 
  bit to these documents like.
Mahmoud Alkhraishi:  Yeah happy to walk through them um I want to 
  say thank you all this I know this is not an easy process there's 
  I know we haven't done it in a while and there's a few hiccups 
  um.
Mahmoud Alkhraishi:  I wanted to have a chat with you afterwards 
  maybe about a few things we could do to hopefully streamline this 
  for the other participants but um there are 2 reports 1 for the 
  traceability vocab 1 for the traceability interop both have been 
  a work in progress since uh 2020 and they both tackle to close 
  topics but they're a little bit different the traceability 
  vocabulary aims to provide a vocabulary that would be used for 
  asserting claims and verifiable credentials that talk about 
  Supply chains and traceability within them they talk about 
  products they talk about organizations they talk about chemical 
  properties they talk about attributes uh like uh country of 
  origin and that kind of stuff things about the Providence of a uh 
  credential the traceability anthrop is started off as a profile 
  of the VC API that was a little bit more restrictive with a few 
  different um.
Mahmoud Alkhraishi:  Things picked out so that it would Aid in 
  Enterprise uh interoperability that was specific to the 
  traceability sector so there were a lot of assumptions about the 
  kind of company that would run it there's a lot of assumptions 
  about the kinds of things that you would want to do it and so we 
  aimed to keep it in line with the VC API for the first while um 
  after I want to say 3 years it started becoming its own thing and 
  uh now it's published and it is intended to be used as a way to 
  provide traceability documents from 1 point to the other over 
  long-lived workflows that would allow people to correlate that 
  would allow organizations to correlate credentials that relate to 
  a life cycle of a specific product so there's a lot of things to 
  go over there I'm happy to go in depth at any time anybody would 
  like but um at risk of hijacking this meeting if there are any 
  questions I'm happy.
Harrison_Tang: Thank you thank you will and thank you Mammoth and 
  by the way I probably would like you to uh uh come here and 
  present those uh 2 papers uh at some point uh in the next the in 
  the new year.
Mahmoud Alkhraishi:  Answer them yeah.
Harrison_Tang: Sounds good thank you.
Harrison_Tang: Last call or the announcements reminders or what 
  kind of related thanks.
<christopher_allen> First post is: 
  https://www.blockchaincommons.com/musings/musings-cliques-1/
Christopher Allen: 
  https://www.blockchaincommons.com/musings/musings-cliques-2/
Harrison_Tang: All right so let's get to the main agenda so again 
  we're very excited to have Christopher Allen here to talk about 
  Edge identifiers and clicks I saw that uh I saw his blog post 
  about a month ago and I thought it was really really good uh 
  especially I did have the same questions in regards to the single 
  key Paradigm and uh I think he in his block goes he actually uh 
  correctly pointed out in my opinion uh the flaws and the 
  challenges in regards to the single click uh Paradigm how we can 
  actually uh change that using Edge identifier so without further 
  Ado um Christopher Allen uh your the floor is yours.
<mahmoud_alkhraishi> as a correction, i believe the traceability 
  wokr started early 2021 not 2020!
Manu Sporny:  You're muted Christopher I think.
Harrison_Tang: Yes sorry of course the firm.
Harrison_Tang: I think you're on mute still.
Christopher Allen:  Can you hear me now.
Christopher Allen:  Okay so um uh.
Christopher Allen:  I um uh have been talking about this for a 
  while I think the first time uh I did it was at the last TPAC a 
  little more a little uh uh briefly um I also have a brief video 
  that I'll share um uh at the end of the meeting which is a a 
  longer version of what I'm going to go through here um but what 
  I'm really wanting to do with this community is talk about the 
  implications of this so let me first reiterate it so that people 
  have the basic understanding and then um I can go into some more 
  uh uh specifics so um uh you know if you don't know me I've been 
  involved for a very long time in this community and then before 
  that uh you know with organizations like digicash and pgp and 
  whatever uh uh uh prettl and then I was the co-editor and 
  co-author of the TLs protocol and then blockchain Commons is.
Christopher Allen:   An organization.
Christopher Allen:  On uh interoperable secure and compassionate 
  infrastructure uh in particular decentralized Solutions where 
  everybody wins um.
Christopher Allen:   So as.
Christopher Allen:  Uh Harrison mentioned there is the uh uh the 
  single signature Paradigm if we look at you know uh digital 
  signatures today they were uh you know invented in uh kind of a a 
  rough form in the late 70s really in the uh 80s is when the 
  cryptography uh emerged and also a lot of the patents started 
  getting locked up um and uh uh you know you know with real 
  deployment of them in the 90s uh in Technologies like pgp early 
  on and then later uh SSL TLS uh uh.
Christopher Allen:  Etc to uh you know move to today and to a 
  certain extent we've been locked into a lot of the assumptions of 
  that basic technology um uh and I think that there are now real 
  solid mature and uh uh you know opportunities to rethink that and 
  this is just the beginning of a discussion about that so um uh 
  let's first talk about the the the the dangers of the Paradigm 
  obviously you have a single point of compromise you know whether 
  or not it's uh you know somebody stealing uh a key or uh doing a 
  uh uh supply chain attack or um you know dealing with side 
  channels Etc it's just a real uh uh.
Christopher Allen:   You know.
Christopher Allen:  Uh risky single point it's also a single 
  point of failure in a variety of ways that aren't about 
  compromise you know some of this is you know because of key 
  fragility because of bit rot you know I have some old pgp keys 
  that I can't seem to get to work anymore sometimes it's format 
  changes you know I have some some uh you know uh you know old uh 
  keys from the early days of Bitcoin that I can use but I have to 
  keep an old copy of the software around.
Christopher Allen:  And then you know as we started doing a lot 
  of the work in uh dids uh we really said hey key rotation and key 
  separation are really important and it's hard uh to do with the 
  single signature par Paradigm and then I wrote a book with 
  Shannon and 1999 that talked about the 28 adversaries of keys and 
  this is the the list categorized in uh you know these uh uh 7 
  categories um and this was really focused on digital asset Keys 
  uh since that book I've you know at least added uh 2 or 3 uh 
  possibilities for um identity focused adversaries uh for Keys um 
  so we've got to address these problems uh and um uh now they're 
  begin to be some new opportunities to do so.
Christopher Allen:  You know where I really want to start with 
  and I I can't say I'm the first 1 is is uh you know talked about 
  this but I think cryptographically it's been hard to do um and 
  now we have an opportunity to do it so um if we go back to uh you 
  know my original vision of self Sovereign identity it really was 
  all about your relationships uh you control your identity but you 
  don't control the network and we you know it was designed the 
  whole point of the 10 principles was to support human dignity but 
  also to allow people you know people to be peers not petitioners 
  um and uh you know so but still it's not like you're this 
  isolated uh being in this Digital Universe you have relationships 
  and um uh we can't forget that in in SSI um so.
Christopher Allen:  So uh if we talk about relationships from a 
  sociological perspective you know identity is actually 
  decentralized already it's a bunch of edges you know when um you 
  know your first identity was your you know mother's son or 
  daughter.
Christopher Allen:  Uh you know while you know you were still in 
  in her um uh pregnant body and um.
Christopher Allen:  That it was that is in effect the first you 
  know identifier uh and that is a uh you know affiliate link and 
  uh you know which goes backward in time forward in time but we 
  also going to have fraternal links Etc so we can kind of consider 
  these edges as membranes where there's kind of a a selective 
  information you know uh between the entities you know um and 
  there's a lot of you know papers if you look up local names or 
  pet names Etc uh that have talked about you know how this um uh 
  can be a different way of approaching identity um.
Christopher Allen:  Now we come to you know some modern 
  technology Shore is a particular signature um uh uh system that I 
  admire and 1 of the things is that some of the modern advances 
  leveraging Shore have the power to create these relational 
  relational edges so for instance 2 parties can create a key pair 
  together where each party contributes a a secret but in fact the 
  private key only exists in kind of what I call a cryptographic 
  fog um and 1 of the interesting things about Shore is that these 
  multi are the same size as a single Sig they are you know you 
  know unless you reveal that they are a multi-sig you know they're 
  indistinguishable from a single signature um and this means in 
  the that the the group public key of these 2 parties uh is um.
Christopher Allen:  Is an edge.
Christopher Allen:  I mean it's a public key it looks like a 
  public key of an individual uh but in this particular case it is 
  referring to say the edge between Anna and Mary and Mary and 
  Joshua um this you know group sort of fog private key allows for 
  joint signatures so uh you can sign things together uh either 
  indistinguishable from you know just being the the the that edge 
  or you can say you know Mary and Joshua have done so together but 
  it's a single uh cryptographic uh proof um so uh that really kind 
  of leads up from edges to uh groups so um let's talk about a 
  closed click which has some you know interesting opportunities uh 
  this is the simplest form of a click um where there's basically 
  an edge identifier between every pair of entities um and then 
  together these married.
Christopher Allen:   To Joshua.
Christopher Allen:  Joshua um uh identifiers and keys can 
  together create yet another key which identifies the click and 
  that means that all 3 parties can participate in joint decisions 
  and signatures and once again be indistinguishable and not 
  correlate with the individual parties um uh and then of course 
  you can go up forward from there you can have higher order clicks 
  uh you know try to assist the simplest but you know it's um uh 
  you know a uh an a.
Christopher Allen:   I'm not.
Christopher Allen:  Ally which it is it's not it's not a uh it it 
  isn't a straight graphic its larger the more members there are 
  the harder it is to close the graph um but you know you can do 
  some fairly complex things here um and you can do these really 
  interesting uh.
Christopher Allen:  Things where Clicks in turn can be recursive 
  so you can have a click and another click and another click which 
  together create an even larger group uh a click of clicks um and 
  I think this also offers some very interesting power that Central 
  signature and that diagram again is indistinguishable from the 
  signature of uh uh a single person um.
Christopher Allen:  So what are the advantages of these Edge 
  identifiers and clicks well um among other things in 
  decentralized identity management it it offers some opportunities 
  for peer-based identity creation and uh also peer-based identity 
  validation in ways that um uh don't require uh uh a centralized 
  party it's just the peers that do it um the uh there is uh uh 
  Spock and Spa are are single point of compromise single point of 
  failure um resilience so distributed control guards against 
  different kinds of compromise and fail failure we have 
  opportunities for secret group decision making and we have the 
  opportunities for enhanced privacy and there are a lot of 
  different variants here I'm not proposing any particular 1 here 
  I'm just saying there are new opportunities uh given this um 
  there are uh some identifiers uh click identifier drawbacks they 
  are.
Christopher Allen:   Are more.
Christopher Allen:  Complex right now they require um you know 
  multi-signature technology which has you know matured in the last 
  5 6 years uh but is new um multi-set instantaneous so there's no 
  instant gratification and it is a new paradigm you know there are 
  you know going to be new risks that are uh you know as we create 
  these systems that you know we've not seen before um.
Christopher Allen:  Very quickly go through this page uh uh so 
  obviously you know those clothes clicks are hard they get bigger 
  and bigger uh but you don't necessarily have to have closed 
  clicks you could have open clicks which is often more realistic 
  um uh they lose some graph analysis advantages and certain 
  cryptographic things you can do when a click is closed but it 
  also you know offers some new possibilities.
Christopher Allen:  I particularly like what I've been calling 
  fuzzy clicks again you know my own terminology for it but um uh 
  they allow for threshold signings so that just some members of 
  The Click uh can participate so uh you can be in say in a 2 of 3 
  it can be um you know Mary or Bob or Bob or Joshua or Joshua and 
  Mary uh that can uh sign for the group um.
Christopher Allen:  And uh but I think the real opportunity here 
  is that clicks can be used with devices so devices can be part of 
  clicks uh you can have your ring and your phone and uh you know 
  an offline Service uh together be part of a clique that is a 2 of 
  3 and if any 1 of them fail uh you still have your identifiers 
  and your keys and that what you need to do to rotate and move 
  things forward um and then of course these can be combined with 
  the you know person oriented clicks so um now with this uh Triad 
  uh that is the relationship well it's really a a diad of Mary and 
  Joshua uh but if Mary lost her secret or Joshua lost his uh 
  they've lost their uh their Edge identifier but if they do it in 
  a click form where the third party is a uh.
Christopher Allen:  Uh you know a hardware click they have now uh 
  increased reliability um either 1 of them can fail and then the 
  the remainders can basically recover uh Keys uh rotate Keys Etc.
Christopher Allen:  So let's talk about the uh the implications 
  for identity so um you know if we look at uh you know this is 
  really focused on you know the kind of work that we do uh if we 
  look at the the classic faux clear uh peer claim uh and you know 
  I know there are lots of uh limitations of faux and whatever but 
  this is an example of 1 where you know Christopher a says he 
  knows the public key of wolf um and is verifying it uh in the in 
  the original faux uh you could the uh there was this concept of 
  uh uh of um uh nose being this 1-way relationship but then they 
  also had this concept of up here well you couldn't really do the 
  peer uh directly you could maybe have wolf know the public key of 
  Zid you look at these 2 I mean the did ish type uh uh object um 
  uh you could they could basically say in return I know.
Christopher Allen:  The wolf knows.
Christopher Allen:  And then you can infer that their peers this 
  isn't really a peer statement as opposed to uh in a uh uh an edge 
  credential and kind of a VC style you know we are a peer group uh 
  here are the 2 peers here's the public key that is the public key 
  of the of the peers you can get the public key of Christopher a 
  the public key of wolf aggregate them and go oh yeah that is the 
  public key of the of them both and then verify it so that gives 
  us a lot of you know interesting opportunities to make crypto ref 
  proofs about these types of things um and of course with Elysian 
  uh you know we don't have to reveal that those are actually 2 
  parties so you we can basically say this is a peer group but 
  we're not saying who the peers are but you can still validate the 
  signature um uh so I think there's some real you know interesting 
  opportunities uh in that uh in that.
Christopher Allen:  In that space and I've been exploring this a 
  lot more um with different kinds of proofs and you know uh when 
  might you want to align signatures or signature um metadata uh 
  also you know trying to puzzle out how to do this with object 
  capabilities and uh some other opportunities.
<phil> Does the ELIDED (2) convey that the group consists of a 
  pair?
Christopher Allen:  So some final notes uh the single signature 
  Paradigm is not enough we really need these relational 
  identifiers for peers and groups um there are the interesting 
  exotic opportunities in nested open and fuzzy uh groups they're 
  interesting challenges um and this is a really rich uh Paradigm 
  uh the uh the musings uh uh number 1 is the uh the first article 
  on this topic um I will put that link in the chat in just a 
  second.
Christopher Allen:  Me uh stop the.
Christopher Allen:  Okay so uh let me share my window other 
  window.
Christopher Allen:  There is the share button now.
Christopher Allen:  There we go.
Harrison_Tang: It's the third 1 at the bottom.
Christopher Allen:  Okay so um blockchain Commons is my main 
  website uh the first Edge identifiers uh.
Christopher Allen: 
  https://www.blockchaincommons.com/musings/musings-cliques-1/
Christopher Allen:  Uh post is here I'll put that in the chat.
Christopher Allen:  Uh at the uh uh end of that post is uh a link 
  to uh the open and fuzzy uh follow-up uh there's another version 
  of my presentation on YouTube um the you know we have a whole 
  page on Music 2 technology and how it works including you know 
  some of the implications of you know how you would do a sequence 
  diagram to create this multi-sig between uh 3 parties um.
Christopher Allen:  Does not dive into snore before I have a 
  whole bunch of stuff here on uh you know kind of making uh uh you 
  know what is snore and how does it work um uh but I also have 
  this thing called snore in a nutshell which is kind of an 8-bit 
  uh version of snore so you can understand how how it functions uh 
  we have a whole bunch of stuff on Frost which is uh the threshold 
  algorithm we've held 4 know yeah 4 Workshop uh these are results 
  from the first 3 Workshop we just held a workshop last week and 
  this page will be updated tomorrow uh but there is a uh a frost 
  meeting tomorrow and then we also have a lot of uh you know 
  research papers in our uh blockchain Commons research uh 
  exploring some of the the uh the challenges and stuff.
Christopher Allen:  Okay so uh I'm going to stop sharing my 
  screen and.
Christopher Allen:  Uh open it up for questions.
Harrison_Tang: Phil I think you have a question in regards to 
  evision.
Phil Long:  Noted that when you showed the the way in which you 
  could um share the the uh privately the the combined key and 
  noted Illusions parenthesis 2 parentheses was that conveying that 
  there were in fact 2 members of the group or was that meaning 
  something else.
Christopher Allen:  Um so uh I don't want to go into detail on uh 
  uh gordian envelope uh the.
Christopher Allen:  Uh but basically you have a choice of what 
  you how you want how you want to structure these and what you 
  wish to allow to be correlated so yes you can reveal that there 
  are 2 entries there or you can choose to not uh and just say that 
  there's a single entry there and and it you know because it's all 
  a a recursive nested structure uh in this particular case I just 
  simply because it is a reclaiming its appear I felt well you kind 
  of already know it's at least 2 people.
Christopher Allen:  And uh that that was a better representative 
  of it but that's actually been a lot of what I've been focusing 
  my work in the last 2 months on is exploring uh you know what 
  does it mean to Allied some of this different types of data 
  especially you know with key separation where we might have a lot 
  of different kinds of keys that have different uh uh capabilities 
  different kinds of proofs including non-s signature proofs when 
  would you want to Allied.
Christopher Allen:   Some portion.
Christopher Allen:  Or some details of them and I think there's a 
  lot of work that that is required for that and I and you know 
  have discovered a number of things in uh in uh kind of the the 
  the Json LD style proofs that are kind of difficult to do um you 
  know you know presuming we add a lesion to Jason just straight up 
  Json LD uh and there have been some old proposals for how that 
  might work uh it turns out it's actually uh some stuff is uh a 
  little more hard to do um with some of the assumptions in in Json 
  LD so I've been doing almost all of my stuff right now in uh 
  gordian envelope which I you know maybe someday could be a an 
  alternative to in say a D20 or a vc20 uh a core based a liable 
  structure um but that's you know uh a ways away I'm more in the 
  experimentation phase.
Christopher Allen:   Thank you.
Phil Long:  Thanks that's very helpful.
Alan Karp:  Uh yeah can you walk through how you would as an 
  individual use these keys to to do something.
Christopher Allen:  Sure so um let me go to um.
Christopher Allen:  Let me go to this window.
Christopher Allen:  So this is Music 2 uh so Music 2 is uh an N 
  of n uh protocol so you have to have you know it's not a 
  threshold uh protocol um in its uh in its basic form and um uh 
  you know from the you know uh the the point of view of Alice and 
  Bob uh they're basically you know create kind of create some 
  session keys for each other they're going to share some partial 
  public Keys uh uh which will then allow them to uh to create a a 
  group public key and that's what they share with the verifier um 
  so uh then when they want to sign something they're basically 
  doing this non exchange uh and then you know creating these 
  parcel signatures which are basically combined which then allows 
  you to have the the the final verified signature so when we look 
  at this this very.
Christopher Allen:  Uh you know by default sees that there is a 
  public key and assigned message and it verifies like any other 
  schnoor signature um even though it was created by Alice and Bob 
  and this basically represents you know them as uh and a you know 
  as a a uh the simplest Association a diad um and uh what what's 
  kind of interesting about this is that it's not you know 
  obviously you know you could do a verifiable credential that was 
  um you know 1 was signed by 1 and 1 and then there's you know a 
  co-signature by that but that co-signature is what I call a comp 
  computational uh smart contract in the sense that you know 
  there's some kind of or statement uh you know excuse me and 
  statement in code that is evaluate signature 1 and says that's 
  true and then evaluates Signature 2 2 and says that's true and 
  because there is this and.
Christopher Allen:   Statement in between.
Christopher Allen:  Now they're both true uh in a logical and but 
  that computational um uh or statement is uh very easy to attack 
  whereas the the cryptographic and of Allison Bob is a 
  cryptographic function and it's not just simply swapping out the 
  logical and operator in some hack for a logical or operator it 
  the mass just simply will not work uh unless it is an and and I 
  think there's some real power in thinking about the you know the 
  Futures where you have these cryptographic and not comp uh uh you 
  know scripts whether or not simple logical scripts and or not or 
  more powerful scripting functions I've talked about that in in a 
  couple of papers.
Alan Karp:  So yeah well not really because uh I said as an 
  individual so this means that to to use these keys I need to 
  coordinate with at least 1 other party is that true.
Christopher Allen:  Yes um but that being said if we go back to 
  um where is my.
Christopher Allen:  Okay so if we go back to this um you know 
  this is 1 of the first things that we've been implementing here 
  at blockchain Commons is uh you know 1 of our patrons is a is a 
  ring um uh cryptographic ring and uh it has cryptographic 
  material on it uh.
Christopher Allen:  A you know a phone that acts as a coordinator 
  that has another um uh excuse me the Hub would be the phone um 
  which has another uh secret on it um and all I need is my you 
  know my ring and my phone which are together here with me to 
  represent me uh and even though there is uh you know an operation 
  that is happening here um the advantage of having the this in a 
  in a 2 of 3 and a in a fuzzy click is that the um you know I can 
  have a an offline or another uh you know social key recovery 
  service or whatever that if you know I my phone dies or Android 
  uh uh you know uh becomes corrupted uh that single key will not 
  be a single point of compromise my my offline service and my ring 
  can still recover you know my public identifier.
Christopher Allen:  Um so but yeah any 1 of these operations is 
  going to require some kind of communication between uh 2 devices 
  or 2 people or 2 services at minimum.
Alan Karp:  Okay know that answers the question thank you.
Manu Sporny:  Yeah this is a great Christopher I I read um either 
  your blog posts and kind of tried to internalize how we could 
  maybe apply some of this stuff to the existing did and in VC 
  ecosystem um so I I think I get the the whole like you know to 
  issue something you've got to run this cryptographic protocol to 
  get the parties together to share you know parts of their key and 
  generate the signature um for the verifier it seems like the only 
  thing the verifier needs is is the combined you know public key 
  um and the signature and they should be able to verify that just 
  in and of itself is that correct.
Christopher Allen:  That is correct um so you know let let's talk 
  about you know 1 of the interesting things I think we first 
  talked about this in um uh when you presented verifiable 
  credentials at our wat 2 in in New York City uh after the UN 
  event which is there uh you know we have all of this work this 
  desire to be decentralized uh but then we have this problem of 
  the issuers are centralizing because in issuer is making a claim 
  and that is a natural centrality and um uh however I think 
  there's some interesting opportunities maybe not precisely 
  decentralized but in more distributed Fashions uh you could 
  basically say the DMV which among other things requires uh uh uh 
  you know a uh uh driver's test uh you could have uh you know.
Christopher Allen:  Drivers test which is judged by multiple 
  parties who uh and it's some Quorum of them which might be 2 of 
  99 uh to basically say yes this person has passed their driver's 
  test and uh now you have this uh this proof uh that is you know 
  represents the the the all of the DMV and there's no single point 
  of failure um I could see also a lot of interesting Hardware uh 
  things we can do here where um especially as we're exploring uh 
  key rotation and key recovery right now there are very explicitly 
  proven and working um key recovery things so if uh you have a bit 
  rot on 1 of your uh Quorum devices uh that that key can be uh 
  restored if you now want to move from say A you know 3 or 5 to a 
  4 of 9 you can create a new Quorum uh and still keep the same 
  public key those are.
Christopher Allen:   I I considered.
Christopher Allen:  Be relatively mature.
Christopher Allen:  There are papers and other you know work 
  beginning on also how to do approvable rotation where the the the 
  old Quorum whatever remains of it you know uh say it's a 3 of 5 
  and 2 of them have gone down and they're going oh no we're now 
  we're you know any 1 of us fail the whole Quorum fails well they 
  can basically not just regenerate the 2 Bad Keys maybe they were 
  compromised instead of uh just bad uh they can basically create a 
  new public key identifier plus a cryptographic proof that this 
  could not have happened if the first Quorum didn't exist um and 
  then once again we're back to a uh a new um uh you know a a real 
  cryptographic key rotation uh and thus eliminating and 
  distributing some of the risks of the single keys in uh in an 
  issue work.
Harrison_Tang: Well no I think you have a follow-up question.
Manu Sporny:  I do but I'll I can go after well.
Will Abramson:  Cool yeah thanks I wanted to say 2 things the 
  first is kind of uh.
Will Abramson:  Similar to on my building on my manufactured like 
  in theory you know if there was a snow sep uh verification like 
  signature Suite that existed today which you know maybe doesn't I 
  would like that to be people could be issuing credentials using 
  music or Frost and from a verification perspective you wouldn't 
  know like you know like it would just be the same process the 
  signature would look the same you'd be able to verify a 
  credential exactly the same this this whole stuff that Chris was 
  talking can I happen before we create the signature it's like 
  some internal you know it's kind of like.
Will Abramson:  Did want to.
Will Abramson:  Better support it but like we need to other specs 
  like the bids are kind of already could support it if if people 
  could create these signatures.
Will Abramson:  Uh and I think you spoke to I just went to like 
  this very clear right we could do this today we just.
Will Abramson:  Don't do it.
Christopher Allen:  Correct um you I don't believe that there are 
  any current um uh.
Christopher Allen:  Uh Signature suites oh wait wait wait there 
  is 1 hold on let me let me show you uh let me uh share window.
Will Abramson:  Well I thought Ed 25549 was maybe snore compliant 
  or like similar to.
Christopher Allen:  Okay so it is and it isn't so let's be clear 
  here um so this is 1 of the more mature uh implementations at 
  this point it was found uh I presume are you seeing my screen.
Christopher Allen:  Okay so this is the zcash foundation they 
  funded the frost 1 of the major Frost libraries and they also 
  funded the uh uh the development of an ITF uh uh research RFC uh 
  that uh is just on the signature part of the frost uh 
  functionality um and they do have a frost ed25519 so yes you can 
  uh do frost uh uh with 255125519 and generate a key uh there are 
  some interesting implications of that this is not really 
  completely compatible with.
Christopher Allen:  Other 25519 um uh implementations because 
  there are bugs in 25519 um there are a lot of conformance 
  problems between different libraries of 25519 so if you tried to 
  use uh I mean in fact these days and we just did a 25519 
  implementation for um.
Christopher Allen:  40 And envelope and we basically had to find 
  a library that reproduced the bugs of the SSH.
Christopher Allen:  Cryptography um there are also other problems 
  with uh ed25519 uh in the fact that uh uh that some of the 
  aggregation capabilities of it um are don't work because of some 
  choices that were made uh early on to avoid side Channel attacks 
  um so the most of the the uh to avoid those there is something 
  that is very close to Ed 2551 25519 called ristretto um and it 
  doesn't have either of these problems um but again you know 
  that's not going to be conformant uh you know to um to uh you 
  know SSH uh implementations of 255519 um there's a wonderful I I 
  I I'm not going to try to pull up the the the the the uh the 
  document here um but there is a.
Christopher Allen:   Ah uh.
Christopher Allen:  Uh you know a paper that sort of describes 
  you know the the the challenges there and there are a number of 
  cryptographers that are kind of going hey you know we really need 
  to respect to Phi you know completely redo 25519 because it you 
  know because of these uh.
Christopher Allen:  Valuability and other problems um.
Will Abramson:  I do think I suppose we had like a snore sep uh 
  signature Suite like it would be interesting to think about like 
  what would it actually have to add to that to like support to 
  support like creating these types of signatures I think it would 
  just be an extra sort of paragraph in the create proof section 
  that says you could also create your approved using this 
  algorithm just point out to the you know like here's it described 
  over here like the the like ccg or the work items here wouldn't 
  be defining that stuff just it's defined over here as long as you 
  can create a proof following this process stick it in the DC.
Will Abramson:  They should be verifiable using regular small 
  verification.
Christopher Allen:  That's correct and I mean basically if you I 
  mean if as far as the VC is concerned the spec and whatever it's 
  just a single signature like any other signature that but in fact 
  behind the scenes is uh you know a more complex uh proof so yeah 
  you can start using this stuff now this is kind of why I've been 
  puzzling around this whole issue of this metadata around 
  signatures um you know how how do you include the fact that there 
  are other things going on behind the scenes you don't really want 
  to put it in the the vert the in the the triples of the 
  verifiable credential it really kind of belongs in the signature 
  block to basically say hey there's other things that were 
  happening here if you need to know them here's how you might.
Christopher Allen:   You know.
Will Abramson:  Yes if you wanted to tell someone this signature 
  was created by 3 of 3 of 5 right and like have them be able to 
  verify that themselves.
Christopher Allen:  Correct correct um so they can verify the 
  signature trivially um it's you know how do you add that extra 
  information and how do you secure that extra information as well 
  as you know been 1 of the the challenges that I'm working on.
Will Abramson:  Uh I did have 1 more comment but Mana you can go 
  no man can go.
Harrison_Tang:  I'm sorry.
Manu Sporny:  Thanks well yeah so adding it to the signature at 
  least with the data Integrity signatures is pretty trivial like 
  you can add arbitrary information to that and it is in the 
  signature block and it is signed over a by default so that's a 
  fairly Light Lift I would imagine that you know in in the worst 
  case we're talking about creating another crypto Suite that is as 
  will said effectively a copy and paste of the existing 1 with 
  some minor modifications in there like for example the the Ed 
  ed25519 crypto Suite that we have right now um does try to fix 
  some of the malleability problems with ed25519 so so we we went 
  in and and applied some of the you know the the best practices 
  for making sure that ed25519 was a little more locked down I 
  think the only other things we'd have to add is like will said 
  like maybe a paragraph or 2 to say that you know if you want to 
  create you know a frost based signature this.
Manu Sporny:   Is how you.
Manu Sporny:  Um we don't really even need to use ed25519 we 
  could use ristretto or something else like that I think that 
  there are 2 big challenges that I see here so I I don't see the 
  crypto Suite as a challenge that's fairly uh uh simple to put 
  together um.
Manu Sporny:  And it it ends up looking.
Manu Sporny:   Just like.
Manu Sporny:  Regular verifiable credential you know at the end 
  of the day so that's that's a good thing um and that's not 
  difficult um the the thing where I'm I don't quite understand how 
  we we scale is you know for for every click.
Manu Sporny:  You have to kind of identify that click I mean 
  that's and the clicks kind of identified through a public key but 
  but then how does the verifier know whether or not to trust that 
  click my my presumption here is that you'd put it in something 
  like the did document you would just list it as another key that 
  can make assertions in your did document and the verifier somehow 
  uh finds out that you know oh you are you know presenting this or 
  or they they figure out a way to find you know that key 
  publication in a did document that they trust and then that's the 
  thing that gives them kind of trust in the issuing click right 
  they they have to kind of do some kind of Discovery process to 
  figure out who if if 1 of the issues issuers they trust is a part 
  of a clique that ended up um.
Manu Sporny:  Issuing the the credential so do you have um what 
  are your what are your thoughts on oh sorry that was 1 of the 
  things so I I it feels like there's an explosion in public Keys 
  when we need to put them somewhere like in a did document the 
  other difficult thing as you know Christopher is like getting 
  some variation of this through the ietf crypto form research 
  group can take years um but this feels like.
Manu Sporny:  You know doable like I mean it if we started today 
  I would imagine we'd be able to get this done in like 2 years um.
Manu Sporny:  So so what are your thoughts on kind of the 
  standardization that would need to happen with some of this Frost 
  stuff and then what are your thoughts on you know how does the 
  verifier trust the issuing click.
Christopher Allen:  Right so I think it depends on things so I'll 
  give you this example uh I I'm sure are you seeing my shared 
  screen.
Christopher Allen:  Okay so obviously this requires nothing but 
  you know just simply saying here's you know ah you know seventh 
  uh um uh you know signature Suite which supports say uh you know 
  a bip 340 Shore or ristretto 255 ristretto or whatever um uh you 
  and this is again 1 you cannot do with 25519 um but this actually 
  here is an interesting thing because when I reviewed that this is 
  a peer group.
Christopher Allen:  I can simply do a a cryptographic finite 
  field edition of this public key and this public key and it will 
  equal this public key okay that's 1 of the things that schnoor 
  offers is this finite uh field um uh aggregation capability so 
  you know if you know who's what Christopher's public key is and 
  what Wolf's public key is you uh then.
Christopher Allen:  This fairly trivial operation uh to determine 
  yes that they you know this would not be possible unless those 2 
  were were the same and so you might verify the signature uh that 
  is you know using this thing here but this sort of allows for 
  some additional information revealed and I think this is a uh you 
  know this is a small example of a whole bunch of these kinds of 
  problems because for instance um uh this is what I call an 
  accountable uh signature in the sense that um because we're using 
  Music 2 uh we can through a variety of mechanisms know 
  definitively that Christopher was 1 of the parties that signed it 
  meaning Christopher is accountable as 1 of the parties in this in 
  this Quorum of 2 of 2 or if you're using Taproot there's some 
  other techniques where you're combining these um and if you go to 
  my last frost presentation uh from last Tuesday um on YouTube.
Christopher Allen:   You can see.
Christopher Allen:  An example of it.
Christopher Allen:  You can know but Frost is not an accountable 
  protocol in fact um you know even though I have secret material I 
  can't prove that I contributed to the signature.
Christopher Allen:  Um I a quorum of parties can prove can prove 
  that I contributed or make a claim and prove that I contributed 
  to the signature but it's what is known as a non-accountable 
  signature so it turns out there's some interesting advantages for 
  having non-accountable signatures that you know prevent certain 
  kinds of coercion allows for certain kinds of voting and 
  anonymity but sometimes you want parties to be accountable so how 
  do you do both is kind of 1 of my big challenges you know uh this 
  month the next month um and you know I've begun to work on it in 
  uh this uh research paper so and we've you know barely begun um.
Manu Sporny:  Yes very helpful thank you.
Christopher Allen:  Oh and 1 thing I was subtle in there because 
  I hadn't really come up with it was in that 1 I'd actually put 
  that peer information in the in with the credential um but in 
  fact it really should have been in the signature block um and 
  because but it's something extra in the signature block that 
  requires it or the proof block uh it's some other proof that if 
  you need that if you really want you know to verify that it truly 
  is a peer because there's because that's important for some 
  reason or a click or 1 of these other forms uh you know which can 
  be a proof of of Click formation you know you can do all these 
  social you can do all these graph cryptographic graph things with 
  it um you know so you the signature may not be all you need you 
  also want in some cases to do this other stuff it really belongs 
  in the signature block.
Harrison_Tang: Thank you thank you Christopher I always enjoy 
  when you uh jump on and talk about this kind of stuff so thanks a 
  lot.
<christopher_allen> My email ChristopherA@LifeWithAlacrity.com
Harrison_Tang: All right so who's uh this week's uh ccg meeting 
  uh I have to send out the email in regards to the culture vote uh 
  if you have any questions just uh email me back but thank you 
  thanks Christopher thanks Manu thanks will thanks everybody uh 
  today.
Christopher Allen:  Okay and my emails in the transcript.

Received on Wednesday, 11 December 2024 16:51:37 UTC