2019-02-06-Notes

Attendees

Vipin Bharathan, DLT.NYC- www.dlt.nyc
Nathan George, Sovrin
Matt Raffel
Sam Curren
Stan Liberman

Agenda: 2019-02-06

Notes:

. Nathan presented a new project proposal (we have found a name: Envoy)- see diagram below

Nathan laid out the rationale for the new project.

It is to carve out the items described below (Hyperledger Envoy) into its own project.

This has the following advantages: Any ledger that follows the resolver interface can be substituted for the Indy Registry. In effect loosely coupling this part can make the project re-usable for any DLT inside Hyperledger.

The main dependency is on Ursa as a crypto library from top to bottom of the stack.

Another great result will be the use of this Agent or edge protocol (let us call it Envoy) to manage claims that are more generic than Identity specific claims and use any ledger as the registry layer. As long as one follows the unlinkability of pairwise DiDs, this will have salutary effects on Privacy for value exchange and storage of claims (eg: I own 1 satoshi of BTC)

Stan asked a provocative question whether this will cause Indy to disappear. Nathan says that since Indy has a good resolver interface to manage verifiable registry, Indy will survive and demonstrate that it has value.

Sam Curren talked about the Sovrin Connectathon which is to demonstrate and thrash out technical details of a proto-Envoy; one that supports a very limited set of The Agenty side of Envoy, albeit in a very simple form. Detailed Agenda is here. It is coming up soon, so if you want to participate, please sign up. there may be a limited remote reachability (in the form of videos/slides for just the presentations)

Vipin talked about technical and social evangelism. There is a lot of talk about the overreach of technical giants who have created enormous privacy challenges through what is called "surveillance capitalism" (see the book by Shoshanah Zuboff); technological solutions are being viewed with suspicion. It is not by dismissing these concerns with a handwave or disdain that we will change perceptions. It is important to inject the notions of privacy by design and other techniques into the debate in a manner understandable by the layperson and demonstrating a different future is possible. Sam Curren responded that he would participate through demonstrating technical solutions that preserved privacy.

We spoke about the timeline for Envoy. It will be suggested after Ursa becomes stable; at this point it will be sometime after the Hong Kong event in March.

We also spoke about the future technical underpinnings of Envoy, Message Layer Security standards, Noise Protocol generators, ZKProof developments, formal verification. Nathan mentioned that Rust is being used extensively in Indy and Ursa due to some of properties of memory protection and other features that make it difficult to make egregious mistakes in coding and that aids Formal verification. Further details in the audio call recording.