joint work on rights-respecting digital credentials

[npdoty]

Investigation

Abstract: digital credentials, particularly for the use of high-assurance, government-issued credentials, present opportunities for authenticated high-assurance online interactions, but also serious risks to human rights, including privacy and free expression.

What would this work do if successful?

• assess societal and human rights impacts, and set guidelines for future work
• develop threat model, harms model and potential mitigations
• coordinate design of architectural protections in Recommendation-track deliverables
• provide recommendations for the development and deployment of high assurance credentials systems by governments/industry
• review deliverables, during wide review and during deployment/adoption

Who would be interested/supportive?

• credentials-related Working Groups and Community Groups
• review groups (including at least PING and TAG)
• experts in privacy, free expression and human rights
• ...

Next steps

• Identify where this work should take place, with options including: a TAG-convened Task Force; committed deliverables within Working Groups working on credentials specs; the Privacy Working Group/PING; a new Credentials Interest Group.
• Define a scope of work, in a separate charter or the charters of related groups.
• Review by the Advisory Committee, in charters, discussion at TPAC, or separate ad-hoc meetings.

---

This continues a discussion that has been happening:

• 2024 Hiroshima AC meeting (Identity on the Web, follow-up breakout session)
• Adding Digital Credentials to FedID WG
• TAG Privacy Principles Task Force discussion
• PING credential-considerations repo

[msporny]

+1, thank you for suggesting that a joint work item is something W3C should be considering, @npdoty. I agree that each of the questions you raise above are important not only to current and future work of the W3C Verifiable Credentials Working Group, but the Federated Identity Working Group as well.

This is particularly of concern because of the sorts of data that the Web Platform is going to start enabling. These are not about creating hypertext documents, styling fonts, putting graphics on a digital canvas, or networking APIs. W3C standards are now going to be utilized by nation states for digital credentials that are going to determine if individuals are eligible for work, are able to drive, are a citizen of a particular country, or are able to cross a border legally. The
implications to society are many and need to be considered in a manner that has more oversight than a graphics API or a markup language.

The W3C Verifiable Credentials Working Group has already done quite a bit of work in this area over the past 7 years that I expect will be expanded upon in the work that Nick is speaking to:

• https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model-2.0/#privacy-considerations
• https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-integrity/#privacy-considerations
• https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-di-bbs/#privacy-considerations

That said, we do have to do something beyond what VCWG and FedIDWG are doing. There are more than a few negative ramifications of not coordinating on this work. I know that the VCWG has benefited from PINGs involvement and we'd like to see this scope of participation expanded. We need many eyes on this work, for obvious reasons.

This work is also imperative due to the European Digital Wallet initiatives, who plan to use some variation of W3C Verifiable Credentials, but in ways that could harm the privacy preserving characteristics, such as digital signature unlinkability, that the VCWG has been working to enable. Nation states are looking to W3C for guidance and that guidance needs to go beyond the Privacy Considerations sections in our technical specifications.

We might want to consider embedding this "group of concerned parties" (whoever ends up working on the joint work item) into each group to ensure that there is a tighter coupling between feedback and spec text changes. These work items are not something that TAG, PING, or SING can produce in a vacuum. The work needs "teeth", IMHO, in order to ensure that things don't go off of the rails. That sounds like concrete, standards-track deliverables to me.

[msporny]

To drill down into why a single W3C Working Group is probably not the appropriate venue, we should consider how tightly scoped modern W3C Charters have become. They are no longer a space to think about the problem in general. One could argue that the TAG does that to some degree, but it is also regularly spread thin, so I hesitate to make this a "TAG" work item.

Each Working Group working on a specific part of this is probably not ideal either due to how tightly scoped most WG work is these days. My fear is that the answer for many of the privacy and security concerns will be:
"That's out of scope", because it will be.

• Unlinkability is out of scope for FedID because that's largely a function of the cryptographic mechanisms used.
• Correlatability is out of scope for FedID because that's largely a function of the data format/model being used.
• Human right impact assessments will be out of scope for VCWG because that's a credential vocabulary/schema function.

... and so on. For example, we'll only focus on the privacy characteristics of the Digital Credentials API in the FedID WG and not what's flying over the wire (for the most part). That FedID has to produce /something/ for the Digital Credentials API privacy / security considerations section is a good thing, but to say that we're covered by doing that is wishful thinking, IMHO.

VC WG, FedID WG, and (potentially) the upcoming vocabulary WGs that define, for example, what a transnational citizenship credential looks like, need horizontal review oversight that is outside of each group. If we don't do that, the participants in each WG will be able to drive a bus through the holes in the review process.

The question on my mind is: How do we prevent these WG's from "Out of scoping" our way into a dystopian ecosystem?

PS: To be clear, I'm not saying any of us are intending to "out of scope" our way past difficult questions. I'm saying that badly designed checks and balances tend to lead to badly designed systems that... behave badly. The greatest evils are done by systems, not individuals. :)

[jyasskin]

Thanks Nick for starting the public conversation on how to structure the joint work we need to govern digital credentials. As @msporny says, we need some of the work to involve the right experts embedded into each WG so there's tight coupling between feedback and normative spec text changes. And we also need a venue to focus on a document about the concerns that cut across all of the involved WGs.

I think all of the options in the OP for locating the work are plausible, but I think I lean toward making it a Note that's jointly published by the Privacy, FedID and VC Working Groups, with most of the discussion probably happening in Privacy WG meetings. This isn't perfect—some of the considerations are human rights ones that go somewhat out of the traditional remit of the Privacy group—but it mostly aligns. There's a risk that a publication of just the Privacy WG would be seen as ignoring tradeoffs between privacy and practicality, but I think we can answer that by having it jointly published by the API WGs.

Why not a TAG task force? I think we'd want participation to be open to the public (or at least Members and Invited Experts), unlike the Privacy Principles task force, but that's straightforward. It's less easy to handle the fact that this task force would be recommending a document for the TAG to publish, and based on experience with the Privacy Principles task force, it's hard to get the TAG to actually review a document in detail, which would probably be worse in an area like credentials that the current TAG members have less experience with.

Why not a dedicated IG? I feel like the scope for this document is too narrow to justify the overhead of creating an entirely new formal group. An IG does have the benefit that it can be focused on exactly the right scope and can accept truly public participation, but I think the Invited Expert process can work well enough to get similar benefits.

Again, though, any of the options seem acceptable if a different choice gets faster consensus, so that we can move forward fast enough to have an impact on upcoming European deployments.

[msporny]

And we also need a venue to focus on a document about the concerns that cut across all of the involved WGs.

I will point out that we do also have the W3C Credentials Community Group, whose remit is quite broad, covers all of the things mentioned in this thread so far, has the concept of Task Forces, records and transcribes all meetings, is open to the general public w/ Github repos and issue tracking, etc. We shouldn't forget that we've had a venue to talk about credentials (of all kinds) for over a decade at W3C and it's filled with lots of people, from around the world, with fairly diverse backgrounds in human rights, privacy, government, technology, etc. :)

That said, the NOTE that @jyasskin speaks to above is probably better shepherded by the Privacy WG (to make sure it gets frequent attention and gets done sooner than later), with joint input from all the groups mentioned previously. Circulating it among the Credentials CG should be a part of that strategy.

[OR13]

I think all of the options in the OP for locating the work are plausible, but I think I lean toward making it a Note that's jointly published by the Privacy, FedID and VC Working Groups,

+1 to this.