Please describe your proposed solution.
<u>Introduction</u>
GLEIF, Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation, was created in the wake of the 2007/08 economic crisis by the G20 countries to help improve financial stability worldwide and make sure counterparties to transactions could be readily revealed. GLEIF issues Legal Entity Identifiers (LEI) that provides key information about businesses, funds and governmental organizations participating in business transactions, including their name, when they were formed and, crucially, their ownership structure. More than 2.3 millions of Legal Identifiers were issued so far to companies around the world, a number that is rapidly increasing over time as the regulation enforces their use.
Recently, the GLEIF began to issue a verifiable credential called vLEI (verifiable LEI) that allows the assertion of delegation chains and the digital proof of correctness of things like signatures in financial reports. The vLEI allows those Legal Entities to participate in the verifiable credential ecosystem.
Those verifiable credentials are based on a fully Decentralized Identity technology called KERI/ACDC that requires supporting witnesses to provide a second source of trust. On Fund 9, rootsID got funded to develop the first Proof of Concept for a KERI witness on a blockchain, a project that was delivered successfully on time as you can see in the linked close out report. The proof of concept code is now part of the WebOfTrust repositories and can be found here. Additionally, a working cloud instance is available to try at the following URL: <https://backer-dev.rootsid.cloud>
<u>Our Goal</u>
Our goal is to make Cardano the best alternative as a witness for legal entities that participate in the vLEI GLEIF ecosystem. Those credentials, also called as Organizational Identities, provide a person or thing to prove their authority to represent an organization outside the boundaries of that organization. As this medium article explains, “when the authority of a person or thing claiming it can be instantly verified, the world will be different…
- The authenticity of any digital document, agreement, purchase order, filing, or other piece of data will be instantly verifiable;
- Phone calls, texts, email, and other digital communications originating from authorized representatives (or devices) of an organization — or any delegate from that organization — will be instantly verifiable;
- Some documents will prevent signing and some systems won’t be accessible without the expected authority (a parallel to access control lists);
- The authority of every approval, signature, or other digital action in a supply chain will be instantly verifiable by downstream actors, and irrefutably auditable in real-time;
- Authority will be verified before identity in most interactions, and identity not at all in many;”
All those use cases and any other that you can imagine need to be backed by a network of digital trusted witnesses or notaries. Cardano blockchain, with its extensive decentralization and scalability properties, is an unbeatable option to be selected by those Organization and is part of the identity solution selected by Cardano Foundation. You can find useful to hear the following interview at the Cardano Summit 2023 to Thomas Mayfield, team lead of Cardano Foundation's Decentralized Trust and Identity Solutions, talking about their Technical Development and Progress where he explains the technology and adopted open source libraries including our Cardano backer.
<u>Our Solution</u>
We propose to create a KERI Super Watcher to monitor Key Event Logs (KEL) captured by witnesses and analyzes for suspicious activity that need to be reported to verifiers.
In order to understand what a Super Watcher does, we will explain briefly the following concepts:
- The key events are produced por Organizational Identifiers when keys are rotated, verifiable credentials are issued or revoked or when other information needs to be anchored in the identifier.
- All those events are notarized by a set of witnesses selected by the Organization. An example of a witness is our PoC KERI backer developed as a funded proposal on Fund 9, that we are also proposing to improve in Fund 10.
- A verifier is someone that need to verify a signature as in a verifiable credential or a document for example, and decide if it's authentic, valid and if belongs to the Organizational Identity in question.
A Super Watcher is a service that can be used by verifiers to protect against duplicity events and malicious activity. It's under the verifier control instead of the Organizational Identifier control. It's an observer that acts as a Jury when divergence, inconsistent or suspicious activity is detected. Hence, the goal of the Super Watcher is to detect dishonest identity controllers or malicious third party may have exploited vulnerabilities on the controller of the identifier.
This proposal is to develop and host the first Super Watcher for the vLEI GLEIF ecosystem. It will be designed to provide the following funcitonalities:
- watch and analyze Key Event submitted to the Cardano Blockchain by witnesses
- watch and analyze Key Events available by public witnesses (such as GLEIF witnesses)
- Report suspicious activity
- Discovery of Identifiers participating in GLEIF ecosystem
- Verify signatures
The service will be hosted in RootsID AWS cloud instance and will be available for queries from verifiers.