Created by Stephen Curran with input from the Hyperledger AnonCreds Maintainers.

Implementation Repositories

Specifications

Web and Wiki Pages

Project Health

Things slowed down significantly on the AnonCreds project this past quarter and we’re considering what steps to take next to change the current trajectory of the project. The broader issues are driven by two key issues.

  • The eIDAS2 / EUDI initiatives in Europe that have deemed that security trumps privacy, and having “selective disclosure” is “good enough”.
  • There are various groups (including Hyperledger AnonCreds) working independently on what’s next after AnonCreds for maximally privacy preserving verifiable credentials.

On the first, there are groups in Europe that would like to see more privacy preserving credentials in place, but they are very much in the minority. For example, concerns have been 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. It is not clear if the privacy regulators have weighed in on the initiatives.

On the second, we see a need to try to bring together some of these groups to work collaboratively. The goals are the same, the underlying signature schemes are the same, so the question is how can we generate some synergy on the work?

The AnonCreds Quarterly Activity Dashboard shows the activity on the project repositories from January to March 2024, with 45 commits and 15 contributors in the quarter. Those counts are down substantially from the last Quarterly Report (2023-Q4) and from the previous quarter (Oct-Dec 2023).

Questions/Issues for the TOC

None.

Releases

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

Coding for the quarter focused enabling the use of AnonCreds v1 in W3C Verifiable Credential Data Model (VCDM) format. This was triggered by a “Code With Us” procurement from BC Gov that was won by DSR Corporation for the AnonCreds Rust work, Animo Solutions for the adding support for the format in the Credo-TS and Bifold Wallet libraries (formerly Aries Framework JavaScript and Aries Bifold React Native, respectively and now part of the Open Wallet Foundation), and What’s Cookin for adding support for the format in the Aries Cloud Agent Python library.

As announced in the last Quarterly Report, 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 maximally privacy-preserving verifiable credentials for everyday use. While we have covered the new libraries and investigated how the “proof of concept” code might evolve into an AnonCreds v1 replacement, to date we have had no significant efforts on the project. As stated in the last Quarterly Report, we need to assemble the set of collaborators looking to accomplish that goal that are willing to have developers do the work needed. Yet another presentation at Internet Identity Workshop got some interest, going over the capabilities enabled by AnonCreds v2, and a “To Do List” of things we as a community need to work on. However, there is still no full time development happening.

Few attendees have been at the recent AnonCreds Working Group meetings.

There have been additional, significant contributions of code in the Agora project – audited cryptographic libraries.

Current Plans

Continued evolution of the AnonCreds Rust library. Developing marketing and collaboration efforts on AnonCreds V2 and the anoncreds-v2-rs library or another approach to the next generation of maximally privacy preserving verifiable credentials.

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 13 different organizations.

Additional Information