XDI TC Notes

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

Date: Thursday, 31 January 2019 USA
Time: 1:00PM - 2:00PM Pacific Time (20:00-21:00 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
Joseph Boyle
Drummond Reed

REGRETS

NOTES

General Updates

We caught up on various developments that happened since our last meeting in December, particularly the progress on various âagentâ and âhubâ implementations that could be involved with XDI, per our topic below.

Drummond talked about progress on the work on Decentralized Key Management Systems (DKMS), and that this work may continue in a standards organization.

XDI in the SSI Protocol Stack

Progress is being made on defining an SSI Protocol Stack, where different communities such as Sovrin, uPort, and others are trying to converge on a common shared model for an SSI architecture:

https://medium.com/decentralized-identity/the-self-sovereign-identity-stack-8a2cc95f2d45

We had another discussion about how XDI fits into this stack. First we discussed the DIF (Decentralized Identity Foundation) version of the âSSI stackâ as described in the article above:

In this version of an SSI stack, XDI could fit either at the Transport layer (using the complete XDI protocol) or at the Payload layer (as a specific semantic payload type). We had some discussion about this way of describing a "stack", and questioned whether each layer really builds on the layer below.

We then discussed this alternative vision of an SSI stack from Appendix D of the Sovrin Glossary V2.

In this version of an SSI stack, XDI could fit either as:

The complete agent-to-agent (A2A) protocol layer (using the whole of the XDI protocol), or
As a âmessage familyâ within a more generic, extensible A2A protocol layer.

Markus mentioned that it would be interesting to work on both approaches and compare them.

We agreed that all of these could work, and that a specific work focus of the XDI TC in 2019 could be to define how XDI can fit in both the DIF and Sovrin versions of the SSI stack.

NEXT REGULAR CALL

Due to travel schedules, the next call will be Thursday February 21 at the usual time (Thursday 1PM PT). The link where agenda items can be posted for the next meeting is: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19oDl0lbb56Grehx2a5flZnhrgnua5l8cVvC_dJ8fTXk/edit?usp=sharing