Towards an Abstraction for Verifiable Credentials and Zero Knowledge Proofs

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.