Verifiable Claims for Postal Addresses: A Use Case for Decentralized Postal Services using DIDs, VCs and Blockchains

By Moses MA

Submitted to the 8th Rebooting the Web of Trust Technical Workshop • March 1-3, 2019, Barcelona

Keywords: decentralization, postal services, verified claims, identity, blockchain, decentralized, self-sovereign

PROPOSAL

This is a proposal to facilitate the collaborative drafting of a technical paper that describes the principles and key design considerations for a use case for verifiable physical address claims. Individuals within the global postal network now seek to understand the “decentralization revolution” and help to develop game-changing, blockchain-powered new business models for the world. We believe that the active endorsement, support and participation of the global postal industry could provide a tipping point for adoption of DIDs and VCs. This is a first step toward that desired future.

We base much of our work on key design considerations for decentralized identity, claims and reputation, developed by C. Allen, M. Sporny, D. Reed, and many others (see references), at previous RWOT design conferences.

BACKGROUND

The Decentralized ID movement offers a rare and unique opportunity to fix certain deep, systemic flaws in the methods that currently manage online identity, which has caused significant global issues based on surveillance capitalism and the generation of intelligent, targetable, weaponized propaganda. It offers a next step beyond user-centric identity by offering true user control over digital identity, offering robust and meaningful user autonomy. This means control, not just consent, and thus can offer a smooth path to transportable self-sovereign identity services and resources.

The goal is to implement a rapid entry for postal authorities into blockchain enabled decentralized identity efforts. This is mean to both strengthen postal industry efforts to address the emerging web of trust, as well as strengthen emerging standards and efforts such as Decentralized Identity, Verifiable Claims, identity.foundation, and others.

APPLICATION TO POSTAL SERVICES

Self-sovereign identity adheres to a series of guiding principles — which are meant to ensure the user controls their identity related data. Identity data is a double-edged sword — usable for both positive and negative purposes. Thus, an identity system must balance transparency, fairness, and support of the commons with protection for the individual. These principles are:

Personhood. Users must have an independent existence. Any self-sovereign identity is ultimately based on the ineffable “I” that’s at the heart of identity. It can never exist wholly in digital form. A self-sovereign identity simply makes public and accessible some limited aspects of the “I” that already exists.
Control. Users must be able to control their identities. Subject to well-understood and secure algorithms that ensure the continued validity of an identity and its claims, the user is the ultimate authority on their identity. They should always be able to refer to it, update it, or even hide it. They must be able to choose celebrity or privacy as they prefer.
Access. Users must have access to their own identity-related data. A user must always be able to retrieve all the claims and other data within his identity. There must be no hidden data and be able to operate without gatekeepers. This does not mean that a user can necessarily modify all the claims associated with his identity, but it does mean they should be aware of them.
Transparency. Systems and algorithms must be transparent. The systems used to administer and operate a network of identities must be open, both in how they function and in how they are managed and updated. The algorithms should be free, open-source, well-known, and as independent as possible of any particular architecture; anyone should be able to examine how they work.
Persistence. Identities must be long-lived. Preferably, identities should last forever, or at least for as long as the user wishes. This must not contradict a “right to be forgotten”; a user should be able to dispose of an identity if he wishes and claims should be modified or removed as appropriate over time. To do this requires a firm separation between an identity and its claims: they can't be tied forever.
Portability. Information and services about identity must be transportable. Identities must not be held by a singular third-party entity, even if it's a trusted entity that is expected to work in the best interest of the user. The problem is that entities can disappear — and on the Internet, most eventually do. Regimes may change, users may move to different jurisdictions. Transportable identities ensure that the user remains in control of his identity no matter what, and can also improve an identity’s persistence over time.
Interoperability. Identities should be as widely usable as possible. Identities are of little value if they only work in limited niches. The goal of a 21st-century digital identity system is to make identity information widely available, crossing international boundaries to create global identities, without losing user control.
Consent. Users must agree to the use of their identity. Any identity system is built around sharing that identity and its claims, and an interoperable system increases the amount of sharing that occurs. However, sharing of data must only occur with the consent of the user. Though other users such as an employer, a credit bureau, or a friend might present claims, the user must still offer consent for them to become valid.
Minimalization. Disclosure of claims must be minimized. When data is disclosed, that disclosure should involve the minimum amount of data necessary to accomplish the task at hand. For example, if only a minimum age is called for, then the exact age should not be disclosed, and if only an age is requested, then the more precise date of birth should not be disclosed. This principle can be supported with selective disclosure, range proofs, and other zero-knowledge techniques, but non-correlatibility is still a very hard; the best we can do is to use minimalization to support privacy as best as possible.
Protection. The rights of users must be protected. When there is a conflict between the needs of the identity network and the rights of individual users, then the network should err on the side of preserving the freedoms and rights of the individuals over the needs of the network. To ensure this, authentication must occur through algorithms that are censorship-resistant and force-resilient and that are run in a decentralized manner.

The current embodiment of these principles – which are essentially in alignment with postal industry principles – is being encoded into something called the “Decentralized Identity specification” (DID is the acronym for the decentralized identifier). The DID spec is now being developed a working group at the World Wide Web Consortium, known as the Credentials Community Group. DIDs provide a way for individuals and organizations to create permanent, globally unique, verifiable identifiers that are entirely under the identity owner’s control. Unlike a domain name, IP address, or phone number, a DID is not rented from any service provider, and no one can take it away from whomever owns or controls the associated private key. DIDs are the first globally unique verifiable identifiers that require no registration authority.

We believe that technical cooperation with the DID community will help the postal industry achieve its strategic objectives. Use of blockchain technology can also help to reduce the "postal divide" between industrialized and developing countries and enables the transfer of know-how.

And so, some of the next step/deliverables we hope to develop during the workshop include:

Develop an understanding for how DIDs and verifiable claims would interoperate with postal services
Create a user persona for a typical postal services user to analyze tacit needs
Develop a detailed use case for a “postal address” verifiable claim
Develop knowledge about the use of DID within a reference application for financial inclusion
Understand social/network interaction functionality between stakeholders and users to map out downstream functionality
Develop a pilot development plan (PDP) for the postal industry: a strategy document setting out the pilot implementation of technical cooperation activities
Discuss requirements for a multi-year integrated project (MIP) covering expertise, purchase of equipment and training in this arena
Open discussion on other issues related to this effort

WHY THIS MATTERS

Imagine a world where decentralized technology has been deployed and globally adopted. Let us paint a picture for how this might be achieved. Imagine that this approach becomes part of a decentralized identity solution, driven by a robust and active developer community. The systems and functional resources produced would be integrated into postal services that are used in e-commerce, social interaction, low cost banking, healthcare, and so on. Now imagine that mobile telephony companies agree to embed the technology into the operating systems for all smartphones, and the dominant networks – from social to logistics to financial services – agree to use postal APIs in their algorithms for driving their applications.

This could mean that the postal industry could participate in the beginning of new era for society built on an interconnecting web of trust. This will enable a Cambrian explosion of postal services that will empower e-commerce, financial services, logistics and shipping, and many other areas. It also could mean the end of phishing. The end of spam. All of this is possible via the creation of decentralized trust systems. Therefore, we seek to develop knowledge and expertise in the cost effective integration of blockchain and decentralization technologies to strengthen the applications and offerings or postal organizations, to explore financial inclusion strategies and technologies; to explore and pilot cost effective exploration of advanced technologies to benefit the postal industry.

And so, our goal for this working paper is to map out functionality for such a system. We wish to co-author, with members of the Rebooting the Web of Trust community, a position paper that seeks to address these these and related challenges and to produce meaningful solutions.

REFERENCES

https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rebooting-the-web-of-trust-fall2017/blob/master/topics-and-advance-readings/did-primer.md