2023 Q4 Hyperledger AnonCreds

Created by Stephen Curran and the Hyperledger AnonCreds Maintainers.

Implementation Repositories

Specifications

Web and Wiki Pages

Project Health

The project continues to make good progress in enabling the use of maximum privacy-preserving credentials in large ecosystems. With the completion last quarter of the first official release (0.1.0), much of the coding focus has been on integrating it into different Aries Frameworks, and making adjustments in the library and in the wrappers to enable that. In addition, updates continue in the underlying anoncreds-clsignatures-rs library, addressing both flaws in the design and implementation, and in making performance and usability improvements in the library. The addition of the recently contributed AnonCreds v2 draft code base will be extremely helpful in adding to the Hyperledger AnonCreds momentum.

While there has been a push to get verifiable credentials in use with ZKP capabilities and unlinkability, there has recently been push back on the lack of privacy preserving capabilities being proposed in some of the current schemes that are moving forward. These include concerns raised in Europe about privacy being at the heart of the European digital identity efforts and in the US by the ACLU and EFF. The reasons outlined are exactly why the collaborators working on AnonCreds continue to evolve the capabilities.

The AnonCreds Quarterly Activity Dashboard shows the activity on the project repositories, with 97 commits by 12 contributors in the quarter. Those counts are each up by about 50% from last quarter.

Questions/Issues for the TOC

None.

Releases

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

Coding for the quarter focused on enabling the use of the AnonCreds Rust in the various Aries frameworks, including Aries VCX, Aries Framework JavaScript and Aries Bifold. Work is continuing on adding support in Aries Cloud Agent Python for the new library. Much of the coding in the AnonCreds Rust library itself was on integrating the [AnonCreds CL Signatures Rust] library, and on the wrappers that enabled use in the Aries frameworks.

The Hyperledger Mentorship program enabled the creation of an [AnonCreds Mentorship project], that resulted in our bringing on Aritra Bhaduri who has been extremely effective at updating the AnonCreds Specification to include details of the cryptographic operations occurring during the issuing, receiving, presenting, and verifying (with revocation) of AnonCreds verifiable credentials and presentations. This gets us through the last major hurdle in completing the AnonCreds v1 specification. Remaining is an editorial pass through the entire specification for cleanup and consistency – the easy stuff! And, since all of the objects and operations will remain in AnonCreds v2, the v1 specification is a huge head start towards the creation the v2 specification. Huge thanks and appreciation of the efforts by Aritra who has done an outstanding job!

The contribution of the new AnonCreds v2 code base, and underlying cryptography in Agora, a Hyperledger Labs represents a big opportunity to advance AnonCreds and the idea of maximum privacy-preserving verifiable credentials for everyday use. We need to assemble the set of collaborators looking to accomplish that goal that are willing to have developers do the work needed. A presentation at [Internet Identity Workshop] got good interest, going over the capabilities enabled by AnonCreds v2, and a “To Do List” of things we as a community need to work on.

Current Plans

Continued evolution of the AnonCreds Rust library, completion of the AnonCreds Specification, and ramping up marketing and collaboration efforts on AnonCreds V2 and the anoncreds-v2-rs library.

Maintainer Diversity

Project Maintainers are from three different organizations: Animo Solutions, BC Gov, and SICPA, plus an individual contributor.

Contributor Diversity

Contributions in the quarter have come from at least 8 different organizations, including Animo Solutions, ID Lab of Canada, Roots ID, 2060.io, Indicio and BC Gov.

Additional Information