XDI TC Notes

Following are the notes of the unofficial telecon of the XDI TC held on:

Date: Monday, 7 March 2016 USA
Time: 10:00AM - 11:30AM Pacific Time (17:00-18:30 UTC)

The TC operates under a standing rule approved 17 July 2008 under which the TC does not hold regular official meetings and conducts all business by electronic ballot only. Unofficial weekly meetings are held to enable discussion among members but no business is conducted nor actions taken.

ATTENDING

Markus Sabadello
Phil Windley
Kapil Vats
Les Chasen
Drummond Reed

REGRETS

Joseph Boyle

XDI Core 1.0 Committee Specification Draft 01

It’s finally published! We agreed we should document what we learned about the process on the XDI TC wiki, however without Joseph in attendance, we deferred this to next week.

http://docs.oasis-open.org/xdi/xdi-core/v1.0/csd01/xdi-core-v1.0-csd01.xml

Multi-Party (Group) Messaging

Returning our focus to the XDI Messaging 1.0 spec (and its closely related specs, Bindings 1.0 and Link Contracts 1.0), Drummond proposed that we should dive deeper into the topic of group messaging, including:

Graph structures for group messaging
Group link contracts
Group administration
Applying signatures and encryption to group messages

He suggested some relevant links:

Phil brought up Keybase:

https://keybase.io/

Keybase enables shared private spaces that support encryption on a P2P basis without a central server for anything and making as easy as putting something in a file system. The only centralization is a public key directory that uses social media addresses. This seemed like a good way to share public keys needed for decentralized PKI.

Drummond said Christopher Allen had pointed him at the Minilock permit-based file sharing system and suggested exploring whether its permit-based approach could be applied to group messaging. Markus mentioned a French company that does group sharing of encrypted personal attributes with a shared key.

Drummond and Markus recalled that the TC went discussed the basic group messaging graph constructs in a call a few months ago (Drummond found it was in our 2016-01-04 meeting). Markus said that a set of questions we faced was group administration, i.e.:

Who controls the group?
Can group administration be shared?
Can new members request to join, or can they only be invited by existing members?

#ACTION ITEM: Drummond offered to help work with Markus to document the basic group messaging constructs and patterns, and report back to the TC next week.

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