Liebe Kolleg:innen, dear colleagues,

We invite you to join a guest talk by our visiting professor Salil Kanhere of UNSW Sydney next Monday afternoon.

When? Monday, October 24, 15:30 Where? Room 9222, E3 building, Ahornstraße 55

The title of the talk will be: Practical and Extensible Decentralised Identity Management

Abstract: Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) is an emerging, user-centric, decentralized identity approach affording entities greater control over their identity and data flow during digital interactions. For digital credentials to be widely accepted, there is a need for an end-to-end system that provides secure verification of the participant identities and credentials to increase trust, and a data minimisation mechanism to reduce the risk of oversharing the credential data. In this talk, we first introduce CredChain, a blockchain-based SSI platform that allows secure creation, sharing and verification of credentials. Beyond the verification of identities and credentials, the self-sovereign identity architecture allows users to have full control over their credential data using a digital wallet, including the ability to selectively disclose part of credential data, as necessary. Current SSI solutions, assume the issuers to be “official” entities (e.g., government agencies) who must follow a stringent process to vet their credentials. However, there is no systematic support for directing the same level of trust agencies for individual users who may issue credentials (e.g., delegation of access, consent letter) in the context of business processes. A verifier who relies on user-issued credentials to complete a business process (e.g., a postal worker handing over parcel to someone other than the addressee) bears the risk of accepting these credentials without reliance on a trust agency. The second part of the talk presents CredTrust, a blockchain-based SSI framework that allows individual users to be “onboarded” to the platform as a verifiable issuer via the establishment of a "chain of trust". The talk will end with an overview of TradeChain, an architecture for decoupling identities and trade activities on blockchain enabled supply chains. TradeChain incorporates two separate ledgers: a public permissioned blockchain for maintaining identities and the permissioned blockchain for recording trade flows. Traders use Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) on their private credentials to prove multiple identities on the trade ledger. Traders can define dynamic access rules for verifying traceability information from the trade ledger using access tokens and Ciphertext Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE).

We are looking forward to seeing you on Monday!

Best regards, Roman Matzutt