[EDITOR'S DRAFT] Motivation for Verifiable Claims Working Group Charter

The proposed mission of the Verifiable Claims Working Group is to make expressing, exchanging, and verifying claims easier and more secure on the Web. This document outlines the larger problem statement and goals that motivated the creation of the Verifiable Claims Working Group charter proposal. The Verifiable Claims Working Group Primer is available for a more general overview of the proposed charter.

Terminology

verifiable claim

A machine-readable statement made by an entity that is cryptographically authentic (non-repudiable).

credential (aka attestation)

A set of verifiable claims that refer to a qualification, achievement, personal quality, aspect of an identity such as a name, government ID, preferred payment processor, home address, or university degree typically used to indicate suitability.

privacy-enhancing

A design principle that strives to empower entities to reduce or eliminate being tracked, being correlated, and enables the subject to limit exposure of information to specific entities or specific periods of time.

self-sovereign

A design principle for verifiable claims where the holder of a verifiable claim is in complete control of their identifier, where their verifiable claims are stored, and how they are used.

Problem Statement

There is currently no self-sovereign and privacy-enhancing standard for expressing verifiable claims (aka: credentials, attestations) via the Web.

These problems exist today:

• There is no standard that makes it easy for users to assert their verifiable qualifications to a service provider (e.g. my loyalty card number is X, I have an account at Bank Y, I am over the age of 21, I am a citizen of the USA, I am a Chartered Financial Analyst, etc.). As a result, manual input and fraud on the Web are higher than desired.
• In existing attribute exchange architectures (like SAML, OpenID Connect, Login with SuperProviderX, etc.), users, and their verifiable claims, do not independently exist from service providers. This means users can't easily change their service provider without losing or fragmenting their digital identity. This leads to vendor lock-in, identity fragility (duplication, confusion, and inaccuracy), reduced competition in the marketplace, and reduced privacy for all stakeholders.
• There is no interoperable standard capable of expressing verifiable claims that cuts across industries (e.g., finance, retail, education, and healthcare). This leads to industry-specific solutions that are costly, inefficient, proprietary, and inhibit users' ability to manage their digital identities in a cohesive way.

Note that while the problem statement above is meant to provide the motivation for the work, that the asserted scope of the proposed charter is more narrow, focusing on the data model and syntax(es). Specifically, the scope has been narrowed by:

• Asserting that new transaction protocols for verfiaible claims are out of scope.
• Acknowledging that the creation of supporting infrastructure for self-sovereign verifiable claims, other than data model and syntax(es), is out of scope.
• Focusing the group on Working Group participant use cases which are expected to center on the education and payments industries.

While the scope is narrow, the Working Group is also expected to not prevent future work that may more fully address the Problem Statement.

Goals

If successful, the Recommendations from the Working Group will increase some areas of interoperability between the entities that issue, store, and inspect verifiable claims.

The first goal is to create a standard way for users to assert their verifiable qualifications to a service provider, producing benefits such as:

• Enhancing website usability by removing the need to manually enter verifiable claims.
• Improving the detection of fraud, such as false claims and identity theft, by establishing a standard way to cryptographically verify 3rd party claims with respect to the identified use cases.

The second goal is to ensure that users and their claims can be independent from service providers, producing benefits such as:

• Improving operational efficiency, by reducing operating costs (for example), for verifiable claim issuers and inspectors as a result of a common set of technology for expressing and verifying claims.
• Reducing vendor lock-in by ensuring that verifiable claims are portable from one claims repository to another.
• Enhancing some aspects of privacy and unlinkability for the subject of a verifiable claim.

The third goal is to ensure that there is an interoperable standard capable of expressing verifiable claims that cuts across at least two industries, producing benefits such as:

• Reusability of the machine-readable language that expresses verifiable claims (aka vocabularies) so that a single vocabulary may suit the needs of a broader set of stakeholders, and
• Extensibility of the vocabularies so that a particular industry vertical may build extensions on top of existing vocabularies to suit their industry-specific needs.
• Composability of verifiable claims to express an aspect of one's identity in a granular way.

The standardized technologies will, to the extent to which it is technically feasible, level the playing field for verifiable claims so that small actors or individuals can make use of the technology on the same basis as larger corporations, government, or institutions, without undue or unnecessary barriers.

For more background information about the work, please see the FAQ. There are also a set of focused use cases that are suggested as input to the group.

Proposed Charter

The proposed charter details the first step in making progress toward the problem statement and goals outlined above.