Towards an Abstraction for Verifiable Credentials and Zero Knowledge Proofs

Towards an Abstraction for Verifiable Credentials and Zero Knowledge Proofs

Mark Moir, Harold Carr

30 November 2023

Most standards efforts and projects around Verifiable Credentials either do not enable use of Zero Knowledge Proofs to balance privacy and accountability, or are too tightly tied to specific cryptographic libraries, which limits choice, flexibility, progress and sustainability. For example, if a project targets a cryptographic library that stops being maintained or otherwise becomes an undesirable dependency, these events can threaten the sustainability of the whole project. We are working on an abstraction to address this problem, which has additional benefits such as making it much simpler to express and understand use case requirements, especially for people without expertise in using specific cryptography libraries. These slides share some of our observations, ideas, experience and opinions so far.


Venue : We are hoping to engage with the community, particularly the AnonCreds v2 working group. These slides are intended to facilitate such engagement. So the venue could be a meeting with that working group.

File Name : VC and ZPK abstraction Nov 2023 - new.pdf