myDID

If you are not familiar with the decentralized identity paradigm, we recommend that you first read the <a href="https://blockchainforgood.fr/index.php/telecharger/#par1" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Identity and Ownership notebook - “Blockchain and Sustainable Development” 2022 reportin</a> order to fully understand all the challenges mentioned in this interview. Words marked with an asterisk* refer to the mini-glossary that you can find at the end of the interview.<img src="https://academy-public.coinmarketcap.com/srd-optimized-uploads/a8ab742719f14413b2367df84f9316e4.png" />Frédéric Martin, MyDid CTO —  <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/frederic2/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Source</a>Blockchain for Good: Frédéric, thank you very much for accepting our invitation. You are the CTO of a startup called myDid, can you introduce it to us in a few words?Frédéric Martin: myDid, originally XSL Labs, is a project that I joined with my colleague Imad El Aouny right after the first ICO fundraising for the startup. myDid stands for My Decentralized Identity. Our aim is to develop an identity system that respects users’ privacy. We are committed to ensuring that our solution is interoperable. That is why we are “blockchain agnostic”, it means that we do not consider a particular blockchain to be the solution to all problems and we do not wish to depend on a single chain. We also aim to develop a wallet application, easy to use to make our solution accessible to all, compatible with different technologies, even linked to different blockchains.<img src="https://academy-public.coinmarketcap.com/srd-optimized-uploads/c89427fdbca742ba8625db9fb5d8b502.png" /><a href="https://mydid.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Source</a>BfG: You said you were blockchain agnostic. You are currently developing your solution on the BNB Smart Chain. Why this choice?FM: It is the result of a compromise! Indeed, at the time, there was a spike in Ethereum gas* fees, which made it difficult to develop our solution on that blockchain. In addition, the ICO had taken place with BEP20 tokens on the BNB Smart Chain, so we decided to continue on this one. Indeed, the BNB Smart Chain uses the same smart contract programming language as Ethereum, Solidity, without being as gas-intensive. That said, we want to operate on several chains, including Bitcoin and Polygon soon.BfG: This interoperability notion is at the heart of your project. In the DID field, we talk a lot about W3C* standards. How do you integrate these common standards into different blockchains?FM: We can do it because we are using W3C standards to develop our solution. It is easier to develop an interoperable DID project now that some common standards have been defined. In fact, if we look at the history of DID systems, many projects have disappeared. Not because their systems were not technically perfect, but because developing an identity system on its own does not make much sense without a common repository. These projects certainly had good ideas but only each on their own, so with zero opportunity of creating a real ecosystem! Now, when you develop a DID system, you have the W3C standards, which give a common framework. For our part, we also integrated Open Badge* standards in myDid solutions, a project initially supported by the Mozilla Foundation, which are widely used in the field of education and training. Over time, these two standards have become closer because the third version of Open Badge is also compatible with the W3C Verifiable Credential standards!<img src="https://academy-public.coinmarketcap.com/srd-optimized-uploads/26fd3caf9b22474b84efc07e4835fe40.png" /><a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Source</a><img src="https://academy-public.coinmarketcap.com/srd-optimized-uploads/e955b056ae324db89ec8394d44087561.png" /><a href="https://openbadges.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Source</a>BfG:Staying in the area of interoperability, how do you ensure the recognition of a Verifiable Credential (‘VC’) by DIDs that are produced on several different blockchains?FM: The Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF)* is currently developing a “Universal DID resolver*”, which allows applications to understand and “resolve” many referenced DIDs, even with different methods and different blockchains. Thus, each DID* method is made public to the DIF, responsible for providing tools and references in order to promote interoperability between projects. That said, you can still decide to play solo! I also hope that major actors, those who pay to deploy these DID solutions, including public authorities, will favor interoperable solutions (so they will not remain prisoners of a proprietary system). But there is still a long way to go and the decentralized identity sector is still young. Public authorities are also tempted to develop their own “standards” in the name of sovereignty, which can ultimately harm interoperability or even openness! Some choices can be controversial, such as implementing the European blockchain infrastructure project (EBSI) on a new authorized blockchain whose nodes can be managed by public actors but also private companies chosen by Member States. I hope that in the end, this solution will gain in openness.<img src="https://academy-public.coinmarketcap.com/srd-optimized-uploads/32056862896346198fb871b177d686ec.png" /><a href="https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/wikis/display/EBSI/Home" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Source</a>BfG: Speaking of the role with public authorities, have you already established partnerships with them?FM: For the moment, we are still finalizing the initial stage of software development, our project is still relatively young and our myDid application has been available only recently on Apple and Android stores. That said, since we demonstrated our application at the Paris Blockchain Week Summit, we have multiplied contacts with universities, training institutes and conservatories. Institutions can issue verifiable credentials to recognize skills, experiences... that are stored in the student’s wallet who can then use them to create various virtual and more complete resumes in order to prove their skills and experiences more easily.Public funding is always welcome since it is difficult to find a business model in the field of decentralized identity, indeed there is not really an obvious initial funding model. Not all private funders are sensitive to this topic yet and even though public authorities are beginning to fund pilot projects...well, let’s say that we are very lucky and grateful for the crowdfunding we initially collected. We will probably carry out a fundraising next year.BfG: Your innovative project has something special that the other projects do not have: an NFC smart card containing verifiable credentials. Can you tell us more about it?FM: This is one of the innovations related to our previous work in cybersecurity and secure hardware wallets. Indeed, at myDid, we decided to tackle a rather controversial case: biometrics, which is linked to smart cards and also to targeted advertising ethics. We will discuss that later. For the biometric part, the idea is to combine a smart card with a VC of a biometric fingerprint. The main issue with biometrics is that it does not guarantee a high level of security, in particular because personal biometric data is stored in huge centralized databases that are vulnerable and easy to hack.On the other hand, by combining a biometric fingerprint with a VC system contained in an NFC smart card, storage becomes decentralized, local and individualized (you have your own fingerprint in the form of a verifiable credential stored on your smart card), which solves the centralized databases issue: authentication can be done locally. Let’s take the example of a gate (or portal) using facial recognition at the entrance of a stadium for a sports event: the user presents his smart card to the NFC gate reader, in which he has 2 verifiable credentials: biometric information about his face and about his concert ticket. The gate reader can thus verify that the card does indeed contain an authentic concert ticket and that it is associated with a face that is compared locally with the camera on it. No need for an Internet connection and for a centralized database either.Innovatively speaking, I would like to take this opportunity to talk about what we are currently also working on: our targeted advertising project that respects the privacy of our users. The idea is as follows: a wallet – accumulating VCs - holds a large amount of information about its user. Based on this information, the wallet can very well retrieve targeted advertisements and show them to the wallet holder. Here is the process step by step. Step 1: my wallet application retrieves a catalog of random ads, without any filters at first, which can be stored on a decentralized space such as IPFS. Step 2: my wallet knows locally that I am a Frenchman over 40 years old, and so it can, among other things, display targeted ads on my phone without having my personal data sent to a centralized actor (database), thus without being traced.The development is still in progress but our first priority at the moment is to provide a clear, simple and easy to understand interface for VC issuers.BfG: About the user-friendly interface, on the holder side, I downloaded your app and had my email address verified. Then, I obtained my very first verifiable credential. However, where did the email address I provided go? Is it stored by myDid?FM: Great opportunity for me to talk about some technical details. What it important to understand is that a DID’s goal is to break down concentrated silos containing information about traditional digital identities’ users. The email verification system you used is automated. The only thing that the email verification service company did was to sign a VC with their private key so you could import it into your wallet in order to store it locally on your phone. The VC is simply a credential signed by someone else (the issuer). The issuer has no need to keep the information, no more than the verifier. Moreover, as a solution provider, we do not even need to see this credential so actually, myDid do not need to be informed when VCs are created, distributed by issuers, nor when they are presented to verifiers. We are not a trusted third party: actors must directly prove things to each other. Indeed, when you present your VC, you present a credential signed by the issuer&#39;s private key, on top of that signed by yourself with your private key. Thus, if we take the example of a person wishing to prove that they are over 18, this person will present their VC to a verifier. The latter will then see that a credential has been issued, justifying that the person is over 18 and that the person presenting this credential is indeed the person concerned.BfG: Finally, last question, we hear more and more about layer 2 scalability solutions based on Zero-Knowledge roll-ups*. Do you have any use for it today or do you think it could be useful in the future?FM: I read papers on the subject, there are indeed a lot of technical opportunities. But there is a question you need to ask yourself: does this really improve the solution that I want to provide, or do I already know how to do the same thing but in different way? You must understand When this can be really useful and that it is actually not the case for such cheesy examples like the age of legal majority. Though, we remain focused on serious topics about ZKP, such as reducing the risk of cross-checking information concerning decentralized identity’s users. This is actually one of the important subjects of “Reboot the web of trust 2022” in which we are participating at the end of the month.<img src="https://academy-public.coinmarketcap.com/srd-optimized-uploads/4a2034283a8a4360995cb7cd3e880533.png" /><a href="https://rebootthehague.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Source</a>BfG: Frédéric, thank you for this interview. See you soon!FM: See you soon!Mini-glossaryDecentralized Identity Foundation (DIF): non-profit foundation bringing together main players in the field of decentralized identity. It aims to build open standards, allowing interoperability of DID solutions with each other.DID resolver: a DID resolver is a system component that takes a DID as input and generates a DID document output compliant. The DID document contains information associated with the DID. A universal DID resolver would allow any DID to be used, regardless of what blockchain it was originally created on.Gas fees: fees for transactions on the public blockchain without Ethereum permission.DID method:DID methods are the mechanism by which a particular type of DID and its associated DID document are created, resolved, updated, and deactivated. They are linked to the blockchain on which the DID was developed.Open badge:developed by the Mozilla Foundation, open badges are electronic badges that allow a learner’s skill to be recognized, so the learner/student can then use it on their resume or personal page.W3C — World Wide Web Consortium: founded by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994, the W3C is a non-profit organization that promotes common web standards between various technologies.Zero-Knowledge roll-up (also called zk-SNARKS): technique to improve the scaling (also called scalability) of a blockchain. The roll-up consists in “wrapping” several transactions, taking them out of the chain in order to carry out their off-chain validation process. Once this action has been carried out, two scenarios arise.Either we consider that the transaction has been correctly validated, in which case the on-chain transactions are directly validated. The person who thinks that it has not been validated properly is in charge to prove so. This is called ‘fault proof’. If this proof is valid, the person who made a fraudulent roll-up will have part of their cryptocurrency assets amputated. This technique is called optimistic roll-ups.Either the validator must provide proof of the validity of the process they have just carried out, in which case they will issue a ‘validity proof’, which, once it has been seen by a verifier (a member of the chain), will allow the transaction to be integrated on-chain into a block, marking the end of the validation process. This technique is called Zero-Knowledge roll-up because of the use of ZKP, also at the origins of decentralized identity systems.

MyDid: an identity system that gives back the control of personal data to the users

mydid

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