Hyperledger Aries community drives growth & interoperability in 2020

January 6, 2020

In the space of just a few short months, the landscape for the Hyperledger Identity community has dramatically altered. Three projects now exist within the Hyperledger greenhouse (Indy, Aries, Ursa) offering a plethora of tools and libraries to begin the trusted exchange of decentralized identity credentials. More contributors and maintainers than ever are working together collaboratively to drive the evolution of these projects.

Nearly 50 members from the Hyperledger Aries community came together in early December 2019 to work and discuss various topics integral to Aries, including the test suite and a path toward interoperability with other projects and platforms. Here is a sampling of a few of the fast-evolving updates and conversations from the three-day working session.

• Discussion of protocol testing techniques, including the difference between a unit-test style approach and an external integration test style and their various merits. We also discussed the need for both approaches to have a backchannel for automating tests.
• The Interop Profile 1.0.0 is intended to provide a fixed target for interoperable products and projects. This allows for continued development of future protocols while providing a target friendly to development schedules. We discussed which RFCs should be part of this first version of an interop profile.
• Community Coordinated Updates are required when we need to make a change across the community. While expected to be rare, we are facing two of these changes in the near future. We discussed the process of coordinating these changes and picked the first step to test our plan.
• Coordinating shared library development has been an ongoing conversation on community calls. We continued these discussions and came away with direction and volunteers to move the work forward.
• An ongoing effort for the next versions of Indy Schemas (called Schema 2.0) and its applications to Aries was discussed. This work has been proceeding slowly, and our discussions helped surface the benefits of the new approach Status and development plan and areas where help would accelerate availability.
• We discussed Expanding DIDComm collaboration and the planned Decentralized Identity Foundation DIDComm Working Group (WG). We discussed the merits of the expanded discussion and its effect on the Aries project. We also discussed the proposed WG Charter and proposed changes to the charter.
• Inline key representations were discussed, including how various key types and encodings should be represented.
• Review of the Trust Over IP Stack with discussions on how to generalize the included diagrams for broad understanding.
• How Biometrics are best applied to Verifiable Credentials to promote their best benefits while avoiding the problems that can occur with improper use.

Stay tuned for future community events including connectathons by joining the Hyperledger community.