How often do you hand your government-issued ID to a stranger? You take a photo with your phone, submit it to your doctor or online bank, share it with the receptionist at a hotel or hospital so they scan and save a copy, or give it to a bouncer so you can get into a bar.
Are you concerned that this isn't best practice? That someone could use the personal information you leave online and in the real world to steal your identity? Or do you just find this way of sharing information tedious and repetitive?
South Park deftly handles this complex process as Stan tries to understand the American healthcare system in the Ozmobile special.
As the video shows, when it comes to your identity (filling out documents, applying for access to services, and sharing information between different providers), we seem to be in an era before the Internet, and even in the Internet age, there is a key innovation missing that blockchain technology is unlocking and the Internet Computer has just launched: Verifiable Credentials (VC).
What are verifiable credentials?
Although you may not realize it, you use physical versions of VCs every day. Credit cards, driver’s licenses, transportation cards, passports, etc. are all physical credentials that provide you with special benefits (such as making cashless payments, driving a car, riding the subway, or traveling across borders).
Unfortunately, you can’t use these credentials online – unless you scan them or enter all their details into a web form, which is time-consuming, error-prone and an invasion of privacy.
Virtual certificates enable issuers of physical certificates to provide certificates online following open standards, making them tamper-resistant, privacy-preserving, and interoperable across different systems and environments.
When you have a VC instead of a physical credential, you’ll be able to easily manage your credentials on your phone or laptop, while also gaining a host of security and privacy benefits, including:
VC cannot be copied or cloned;
VC is extremely difficult to steal;
VC allows for selective disclosure of information, so for example, instead of handing over your full driver’s license (with your photo, address, etc.) at a bar, you can selectively disclose that you are of drinking age.
Why now?
There are two key innovations that enable verifiable credentials to be adopted. First, blockchain enables users to control their credentials and enables peer-to-peer interactions (including payments) between users, issuers, and relying parties. Second, keys enable users to securely authorize interactions by simply unlocking their trusted devices.
Blockchain is a powerful solution for 1) directly exchanging public keys to establish a private, secure connection between any two peers; 2) storing public keys to verify signatures on data exchanged by peers, providing proof of true identity; and 3) facilitating permissionless payments.
With these capabilities, it will finally be possible to build a market for selective disclosure of data easily and cost-effectively using peer-to-peer payments, and most importantly, without the need for a central authority.
Key enables users to securely authorize interactions in a user-friendly manner, using a browser-based application. Users can store their private keys in the device’s secure hardware, eliminating the need to carry additional physical cards or manage hard-to-remember passwords.
These two innovations combined make verifiable credentials accessible on ICP.
How do you use verifiable credentials on ICP today?
Verifiable credentials are available on the Internet Computer, and using Internet identities on the Internet Computer, users can obtain verifiable credentials from the issuing dapp and use them with other dapps for exclusive experiences.
If you want to claim and use VC, you can:
Prove to OpenChat that you are not a robot using a credential issued to you by DecideAI (decideai.xyz). OpenChat is a decentralized chat application that runs end-to-end on the Internet Computer. For certain experiences (such as airdrops), OpenChat now allows the creation of closed groups. Access to these groups requires you to prove that you are not a robot. One of the issuers is DecideAI. Watch a video walkthrough of the experience at the top of the article.
If you want to build a VC solution, you can:
Become an Issuer on the Internet Computer. By implementing the Issuer API, you can issue verifiable credentials and empower users to selectively control and share their data, giving them greater autonomy over their personal data.
Become a relying party on the Internet Computer. By integrating with the Relying Party Library, you can become a relying party for verifiable credentials. By requesting verifiable credentials from clients, you can ensure that the claims made by users are verified by parties you trust (issuers) while protecting the privacy of users.
What use cases can you build?
VCs can be used for the same purposes as we use physical credentials in our daily lives, and even more. If you are a blockchain developer, the following solutions can meet the urgent needs of your audience:
Prove your customers are human before airdropping tokens: Do you want to airdrop tokens to your customers to promote your product, but you want to make sure those funds go directly to unique individuals? With verifiable credentials, you can rely on a trusted service like DecideAI to issue proof-of-humanity credentials. To get a credential issued by DecideAI, customers will take a short test to prove they are not a robot. They only have to do this once, and then they can reuse the credential. When your customer signs up for an airdrop, they will show you this credential, proving they are human.
KYC for large transactions: Many crypto platforms require customers to perform KYC before submitting large transactions. The KYC process is cumbersome, personalized and repetitive. Many customers prefer to perform KYC once and apply for a credential that can be reused on multiple platforms. With ICP's versatile VC platform and library, it is possible and cost-effective to build such an issuer.
Why build your VC solution on ICP?
On ICP, the VC platform based on the W3C Verifiable Credentials standard has been launched, and with it a set of libraries, developers now have a development toolkit to express any type of credential in a cryptographically secure, privacy-preserving, and machine-verifiable way on the Internet Computer.
These libraries rely on Internet Identity (II), a key service of ICP. Building VC solutions with II on ICP has several key advantages:
Privacy protection: Issue reusable credentials to your users without using global IDs. Avoiding the privacy issues that come with issuing credentials to globally unique IDs (which is a typical feature of offline wallet solutions), each credential is shared with a unique alias, which is generated by II and known only to the issuer and relying party.
Wallet-less: Users can interact with issuers and relying parties using only a browser, without relying on app stores or centralized large tech companies, which is particularly effective in global regions where crypto wallets are not yet widely accepted and adopted.
Leverage our existing user base: If you use Internet Identity to issue credentials, you gain access to the large number of users and applications that already use Internet Identity (II), which currently has 2.5 million Internet Identities and 100,000 monthly active unique users.
Versatile solution across Web2 and Web3: The VC platform is designed to easily integrate with ICP dapps as well as web2 applications.
What's next?
This is just the beginning of VC solutions on the Internet Computer, and we intend to foster a strong ecosystem of issuers and relying parties to give users greater control over their digital identities and data.
To learn more about becoming an Issuer or Relying Party, browse the developer documentation:
internetcomputer.org/docs/current/developer-docs/identity/verifiable-credentials/overview
To contribute to ICP’s standardization efforts, join the Identity and Wallet Standards Working Group:
github.com/dfinity/wg-identity-authentication
Together, we can move beyond these early use cases and help people like Stan navigate the U.S. healthcare system more smoothly.
references
Cameron, Kim. “The Laws of Identity.” Identity Blog, 13 Oct. 2005, https://www.identityblog.com/?p=352.
Preukschat, Alex, and Drummond Reed. Self-Sovereign Identity: Decentralized Digital Identity and Verifiable Credentials. Manning Publications, 2021.
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