Verifiable Credentials on the Blockchain • Hacker News Board

Re: Verifiable Credentials on the Blockchain

#21

Post by tzm » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 6:40 PM UTC

plttn wrote: post #15

tzm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> finding consensus on a history of transactions. Precisely. It becomes a federated accreditation system that's verified from consensus and identity, rather than a centralized body. It's also immutable and irrefutable evidence of achievement. edit: Could venture to say that this model is what the future of education could look like, where transcripts are determined by your participation on the blockchain.

But how do I know that you've actually gotten the grades to earn the B+ in Calc 2 or whatever? I feel like the blockchain only works when there is a binary yes/no of factuality, and grades can't be defined on a binary factuality.

Great point. This is relate to credential specification adopted by the issuer and the associated evidence of achievement, which could be a reference to another cypher hash. A subsequent parsing routine (from the issuer) could determine evidence meta for evaluation.

Re: Verifiable Credentials on the Blockchain

#22

Post by tobz » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 9:18 PM UTC

rhyzomatic wrote: post #17

tobz wrote: post #16

Ha! I was working on this very concept for a hackathon at work (edX) as a way to think about the future of credentials / authenticity for students taking ad-hoc courses. It's really cool to see others working on this sort of thing. One of the questions I saw, about identity, reminded me of an idea I had to solve this very problem. The hardest part about putting this stuff on the blockchain is that you need to be able…

I must be missing something here, but why not just go with a challenge-proof type scheme? Something like 1. You want to prove to $PotentialEmployer that you own address A which has necessary credentials. 2. $PotentialEmployer sends you a random string. 3. You sign it with the private key of address A and send them the proof. 4. $PotentialEmployer verifies the signed string. If the employer has this proof and can see…

The idea was that, for the lowest common denominator of "hmm, what was your GPA/degree/whatever?", it's easier to give bits of more-or-less secret information than to do a challenge response on the spot.

Everything was about leaving the institutions granting credentials / third parties who consume the blockchain data to handle the technical bits, while an employer or potential employee only had to know where to go and what secret values to use.

I suppose this could be wrapped up in a simple app or something, but I was going for bulletproof-ish. It's easy to remember a social security number, full name, etc. It persists through broken laptops and smartphones.

Re: Verifiable Credentials on the Blockchain

#23

Post by grey-area » Sun, Jun 05, 2016, 5:26 AM UTC

jbpetersen wrote: post #8

toomim wrote: post #5

> Our goal is to help create an entirely new environment where individuals are the custodians of their official records and can easily share those records with others. It doesn't look like they actually need a blockchain for this. They just need an archive of signed documents. They could use a website, or IPFS. Blockchains are hot right now, but they solve a very specific problem: finding consensus on a history of tr…

Without a history all it takes is one leaked key to invalidate all credentials from a given source. There are no guarantees against credentials being tampered with whenever a new version of that source is established.

They could sign with multiple keys, some offline.

Bitcoin also offers no strong identity verification.