| Internet-Draft | TODO - Abbreviation | April 2024 |
| Carter, et al. | Expires 13 October 2024 | [Page] |
This memo describes an architecture for trust registry membership association and verification using Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), trust registries, and the DNS. This architecture provides a verifier with a simple process by which to determine and verify an issuer's membership in a trust registry.¶
This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.¶
The latest revision of this draft can be found at https://CIRALabs.github.io/DNS-Based-VCs-and-Trust-Registries-ID/draft-DNS-Based-Digital-Verifiable-Credential-Verification-and-Trust-Registry-Architecture.html. Status information for this document may be found at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-latour-dns-and-digital-trust/.¶
Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at https://github.com/CIRALabs/DNS-Based-VCs-and-Trust-Registries-ID.¶
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.¶
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This Internet-Draft will expire on 13 October 2024.¶
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This memo aims to demonstrate how trust registries can enable global interoperability by providing a layer of digital trust in the use of digital credentials, demonstrating that trust registries can facilitate a more efficient and trustworthy credential verification process. By leveraging the publicly resolvable and widely supported DNS/DNSSEC infrastructure, entities looking to make a trust decision can easily validate not only the integrity of the credential they are presented with, but also quickly associate the entity in question with a domain name and organization, as well as their authority and trustworthiness by confirming their membership in a trust registry. We will explore how this implementation can present a more decentralized approach to making trust decisions, without having to integrate directly to all trust registries, but instead letting entities involved in private transactions leverage existing internet infrastructure to facilitate their own trust decisions.¶
We will focus this memo around a use case involving an individual or an organization receiving a verifiable credential [AnonCreds] [W3C-VC-Data-Model] from an issuer and storing it in their digital wallet. When the individual needs to provide proof of identity or other claims, they present the verifiable credential to a verifier in the form of a verifiable claim which normally includes a digital signature. The verifier then performs several steps to verify the authenticity of the credential, including extracting the issuer's DID from the credential, resolving it according to the corresponding did method to obtain the issuer's DID document, verifying the signature of the credential using the public key in the issuer's DID document, and finally verifying the issuer through a trust registry grounded in the DNS using URI and TLSA records, while ensuring all these DNS records are properly signed and validated with DNSSEC.¶
This process allows for the secure and decentralized verification of digital credentials in a manner that is transparent and auditable, while also existing alongside and independent of the many different decentralized identity ecosystems and implementations by grounding itself in the DNS.¶
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.¶
Issuer: The source of credentials—every verifiable credential has an issuer. Issuers can include organizations such as government agencies (passports, verified person), financial institutions (credit cards), universities (degrees), corporations (employment IDs), churches (awards), etc. Individuals can issue themselves self-attested credentials - and depending on the governance framework of a digital credentialing ecosystem, individuals could issue credentials to others.¶
Holder: The recipient of digital credentials. The Holder stores their credentials inside a digital wallet and uses agent technology to interact with other entities. A Holder can be a person, an organization or a machine.¶
Verifier: A verifier can be anyone seeking trust assurance of some kind about the holder of a credential. Verifiers request the credentials they need and then follow their own policy to verify their authenticity and validity. For example, a TSA agent at an airport will look for specific features of a passport or driver’s license to see if it is valid, then check to ensure it is not expired.¶
Digital Wallet/Agent: A digital wallet, in the context of digital identity, is a secure platform or application that stores and manages an individual's personal identification and authentication credentials, such as government-issued IDs, passports, driver's licenses, and biometric data in the form of verifiable credentials. The Agent allows the subject to establish unique, confidential, private and authentic channels with other agents.¶
Verifiable Data Registry (VDR): A storage location where information relating to Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and credential metadata are stored. Permissionless blockchains or permissioned distributed ledger networks can be used to facilitate the discovery and resolution of DIDs and credential information.¶
Trust Registry: Trust registries are services that help determine the authenticity and authorization of entities in an ecosystem governance framework. They allow governing authorities to specify what actions are authorized for governed parties and enable checking if an issuer is authorized to issue a particular credential type. Essentially, trust registries serve as a trusted source for verifying the legitimacy of credential issuers, wallet apps, and verifiers.¶
A trust registry is a decentralized system that enables the verification of the authenticity and trustworthiness of issuers of digital credentials. Trust registries can be implemented using distributed ledger technology and leverage the DNS to provide a transparent and auditable record of issuer information.¶
When an entity is presented with a verifiable claim, there are three things they will want to ensure:¶
That a claim hasn’t been altered/falsified at any point in time, via cryptographic verifiability and Verifiable Data Registries (VDRs).¶
That a claim has accurate representation via authentication, via DID Discovery & mapping within DNS as described above.¶
That a claim has authority, or in other words, does the issuer have authority in its issuance of credentials, via the use of trust registries (or trust lists).¶
In this memo, trust registries enable the verification of the authority of an issuer and by extent their credentials. The role of a trust registry within the context of this document is to confirm the authenticity and trustworthiness of the issuer to the verifier after they have validated the digital credential using the mechanisms described previously. This involves the trust registry taking on the role of a trust anchor for a given ecosystem, providing input for the verifier’s ultimate trust decision regarding the credential they are being presented with. The assumption is made that the trust registry would be operated under the authority of an institution or organization such that their claims and input to the trust decision would be considered significant or definitive. An example of such an organization would be a government entity in relation to the issuance of a driver’s licence.¶
It is important to note that the DNS based trust registry mechanism described in this section is not meant to operate in place of an alternative implementation but provide an easy to implement and use mechanism to extend such a solution.¶
This section also does not describe the process of the trust registry’s verification of an issuer, or the process of how an issuer would become accredited by or join a trust registry.¶
Once a verifier has successfully completed the credential verification process, they have definitive proof that the credential they are being presented with was issued by the claimed issuer. However, this process does not provide definitive proof the issuer is to be trusted or has the authority to issue such a credential. The issuer, through use of URI records and the _trustregistry label, can assert the claim that they are a member of a trust registry.¶
Ex: _trustregistry.example-issuer.ca IN URI 0 1 “example-trustregistry.ca”¶
This record indicates the verifier can query the example-trustregistry.ca DNS based trust registry for TLSA records containing example-issuer.ca's public key/s, proving their membership.¶
When trust registry membership claims are published in the DNS¶
The records MUST be scoped by setting the global (highest-level) underscore name of the URI RRset to _trustregistry (0x5F 0x74 0x72 0x75 0x73 0x74 0x72 0x65 0x67 0x69 0x73 0x74 0x72 0x79)¶
The trust registry can assert an issuer's membership using TLSA records.¶
Ex: _example-issuer.ca._trustregistration.example-trustregistry.ca in TLSA 3 1 0 “4e18ac22c00fb9...b96270a7b6”¶
Note that the first component of the URI is the issuer’s domain, followed by the _trustregistration label. This combination indicates that the domain expressed is registered by this trust registry as per its governance model, and this is their public key. This association created by the TLSA record effectively has created a chain of trust, beginning at the Issuer's public key, continuing to the issuer’s domain, and finally resolving at the Trust Registry.¶
It is a MUST that all the participants in this digital identity ecosystem enable DNSSEC signing for all the DNS instances they operate. See [RFC9364].¶
DNSSEC provides cryptographic assurance that the DNS records returned in response to a query are authentic and have not been tampered with. This assurance within the context of the _did URI and _did TLSA records provides another mechanism to ensure the integrity of the DID and its public keys outside of the distributed ledger it resides on directly from the domain of its owner.¶
Within this use-case, DNSSEC also provides revocation checks for both DIDs and public keys. In particular, a DNS query for a specific _did URI record or _did TLSA record can return an NXDOMAIN [RFC8020] response if the DID or public key has been revoked. This approach can simplify the process of verifying the validity of DIDs and public keys by reducing the need for complex revocation mechanisms or implementation specific technologies.¶
TODO Security¶
This document has no IANA actions.¶
TODO acknowledge.¶