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Aries RFC 0446: Aries Rich Schema Credential Definition

Summary

Credential Definition can be used by the Issuer to set public keys for a particular Rich Schema and Mapping. The public keys can be used for signing the credentials by the Issuer according to the order and encoding of attributes defined by the referenced Mapping.

Credential Definition objects are processed in a generic way defined in Rich Schema Objects Common.

Motivation

The current format for Indy credential definitions provides a method for issuers to specify a schema and provide public key data for credentials they issue. This ties the schema and public key data values to the issuer's DID. The verifier uses the credential definition to check the validity of each signed credential attribute presented to the verifier.

The new credential definition object that uses rich schemas is a minor modification of the current Indy credential definition. The new format has the same public key data. In addition to referencing a schema, the new credential definition can also reference a mapping object.

Tutorial

Intro to Credential Definition

Credential definitions are written to the ledger so they can be used by holders and verifiers in presentation protocol.

A Credential Definition can reference a single Mapping and a single Rich Schema only.

Credential Definition is a JSON object.

Credential Definition should be immutable in most of the cases. Some application may consider it as a mutable object since the Issuer may rotate keys present there. However, rotation of Issuer's keys should be done carefully as it will invalidate all credentials issued for this key.

Properties

Credential definition's properties follow the generic template defined in Rich Schema Common.

Credential Definition's content field is a JSON-serialized string with the following fields:

signatureType

Type of the signature. ZKP scheme CL (Camenisch-Lysyanskaya) is the only type currently supported in Indy. Other signature types, even those that do not support ZKPs, may still make use of the credential definition to link the issuer's public keys with the rich schema against which the verifiable credential was constructed.

mapping

An id of the corresponding Mapping

schema

An id of the corresponding Rich Schema. The mapping must reference the same Schema.

publicKey

Issuer's public keys. Consists of primary and revocation keys.

Example Credential Definition

An example of the content field of a Credential Definition object:

"signatureType": "CL",
"mapping": "did:sov:UVj5w8DRzcmPVDpUMr4AZhJ",
"schema": "did:sov:U5x5w8DRzcmPVDpUMr4AZhJ",
"publicKey": {
    "primary": "...",
    "revocation": "..."
}

Use in Verifiable Credentials

A ZKP credential created according to the CL signature scheme must reference a Credential Definition used for signing. A Credential Definition is referenced in the credentialSchema property. A Credential Definition is referenced by its id.

Data Registry Storage

Aries will provide a means for writing contexts to and reading contexts from a verifiable data registry (such as a distributed ledger).

A Credential Definition object will be written to the ledger in a generic way defined in Rich Schema Objects Common.

Aries Data Registry Interface

Aries Data Registry Interface methods for adding and retrieving a Credential Definition object from the ledger comply with the generic approach described in Rich Schema Objects Common.

This means the following methods can be used:

  • write_rich_schema_object
  • read_rich_schema_object_by_id
  • read_rich_schema_object_by_metadata

Reference

The following is a reference implementation of various transformation algorithms.

Here is the paper that defines Camenisch-Lysyanskaya signatures.

Drawbacks

This increases the complexity of issuing verifiable credentials and verifiying the accompanying verifiable presentations.

Rationale and alternatives

  • A credentialSchema object is supported by the W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model specification.
  • It supports rich schema capabilities for credentials.

Prior art

Indy already has a Credential Definition support.

What the prior effort lacked was a corresponding enhancement of schema infrastructure which would have provided the necessary typing of attribute values.

Unresolved questions

  • Is the proposed interface generic enough to support other data registries?
  • Of all the Rich Schema objects, the CredDef most closely fits the format of a DID DOC.
  • However, we are not defining Rich Schema objects as DID DOCs for now. We may re-consider this in future once DID DOC format is finalized.
  • It may make sense to extend DID specification to include using DID for referencing Rich Schema objects.
  • The proposed canonicalization form of a content to be used for DID's id-string generation is in a Draft version, so we may find a better way to do it.

Implementations

The following lists the implementations (if any) of this RFC. Please do a pull request to add your implementation. If the implementation is open source, include a link to the repo or to the implementation within the repo. Please be consistent in the "Name" field so that a mechanical processing of the RFCs can generate a list of all RFCs supported by an Aries implementation.

Name / Link Implementation Notes