Community Newsletter

Project Spotlight: Verifiable Credentials Ltd.

Verifiable Credentials Ltd., a CCI participating company, is looking to verifiable credentials as a way to produce COVID-19 certificates of any type—vaccination, immunity, and/or test certificates, etc. (of course once vaccination or immunity testing is available). In the demo video above, a user registers at a COVID-19 test center to receive an immunity certificate, and then subsequently uses that certificate to show the Nightingale Hospital their COVID-19 immunity status. You can view the iOS version here.

In October, Verifiable Credentials Ltd. was awarded two new project grants. First, they were selected to enter Phase 2 of the European Self-Sovereign Identity Lab (eSSIF-Lab) Business Call. The purpose of this project is to design and build a mutli-lingual policy management infrastructure for service providers who wish to accept verifiable credentials in order to grant users access to their resources. 

Verifiable Credentials Ltd. has constructed three use cases to showcase the use of these policies:

1) registering for the staff rotation of the critical care ward at Nightingale Hospital 

2) downloading an academic paper from IEEE digital library 

3) purchasing a car parking permit online

Second, they were awarded an Innovate UK grant to work with East Kent Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust and Crossword Cybersecurity plc to produce a proof-of-concept trial of COVID-19 certificates. This project will integrate East Kent’s COVID-19 database with Verifiable Credentials’ VC middleware to produce privacy-protecting COVID-19 certificates on demand for both people with smartphones and people with no computing device at all. Furthermore, they will be implementing a Power of Attorney system for patients who are no longer capable of acting on their own behalf.

Verifiable Credentials Ltd's unique infrastructure combines two W3C recommendations together: Web Authentication (FIDO2) for strong authentication and the Verifiable Credentials Data Model for strong identification and authorization. It does not require DIDs or DLTs in order to operate efficiently and effectively. The proof-of-concept trial with East Kent NHS will validate the usability and utility of their solution.

Verifiable Credentials Ltd. is looking to the CCI community for implementations that would be interested in performing interworking tests with its system. Please reach out to David Chadwick if you are interested.

Upcoming Events

CCI Workstream Updates

Use Case Implementation

The CCI Use Case Implementation group had its 20^th meeting on November 10, 2020. Two use case implementations were demonstrated to the group [link to the recording].

Sergio Mello and James Loperfido presented Tangem's hardware SSI wallet that stores private keys and credentials on a smartcard. Issuers and verifiers can issue and verify credentials in an offline setting using an NFC-enabled smartphone. As asymmetric crypto is used, and keys never leave the smartcard, high security is achieved. A holder can selectively disclose credentials using their own smartphone to edit credentials' privacy settings without compromising the issuer’s digital signature. 

Marcos Allende, Jaime Centallas, and Sergio Bazoberry presented DAVID19, an application for COVID-19 self-reporting through gamification. The app provides a neighborhood map view, including statistics on symptoms and reasons why people go outside (in cases of lockdown). The technology is associated with LACChain, the Global Alliance for the development of blockchain Latin America and the Caribbean led by the IDB Lab. For more information, see the book and the website.

The next meeting is scheduled for Tuesday November 24, 10:00-11:00 am ET / 16:00-17:00 CEST. The agenda includes two more demonstrations. Links to recordings of all CCI demos are now available at the demo overview list.

Rules & Governance 

The CCI Governance Framework has completed all reviews leading up to the general availability of the v2 release. With the inclusion of a section on managing and estimating risks associated with handling of credentials, the upcoming release provides significant new material aligned with the emerging news around vaccine trials and planning for vaccination. The CCI Governance Framework team will be working on communications plans to help outreach and alignment with a coalition of communities who stand to benefit from the availability of the framework.

Coordination & Communications

Our main focus before the end of the year is to find CCI a legal home so that we can keep advancing our work on all fronts in the new year and approach potential funding opportunities. We are in active conversations with W3C CCG, Linux Foundation Public Health, and Planetwork and hope to make further progress in the upcoming weeks.

We are doing final preparation before launching the CCI Knowledge Base publicly through our website and Twitter. We want to hear your thoughts on how you would like to use the database and what else you would want us to include in it. Please reach out to Celia Yeung to share your feedback. 

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