Detailed Plan

Background and motivation

iRespond is a privacy-protecting biometric service provider who serves vulnerable populations including refugees, migrant workers, study participants, and others. We recognize Self-Sovereign Identity, Verifiable Credentials, and public blockchains like Cardano as being fantastic tools to empower developing populations including in Africa and Asia to become more successful, even in the face of the agents of corruption around them.

Problem Statement

Verifiers must be convinced of a subject’s. Identity, based on what they hold, know, and who they are. The “who” is often missing.

Proving who you are and the credentials you’ve earned over your lifetime is essential to empowerment. However, the ability to prove these things is sometimes fragile when paper credentials are lost or when it is difficult to prove who you really are while just a smartphone.

To create an ecosystem for digital identity and credentials requires trust relationships between credential issuers, subject, holders, verifiers, and governing authorities. Establishing trust is actually harder than just deploying the technology. From a credential holder’s perspective, e.g., the one who has an Atala PRISM wallet, they need to prove to a verifier they really are the credentials recipient subject.

Solution

Biometrics help one prove their identity. An Identity Binding Credential will link an individual’s DID and their biometric template.

iRespond is one of many centralized biometric service providers (BSPs) who can provide a strong level of assurance that an individual holding and presenting their credentials to a verifier is indeed the subject of the credential. IRespond’s UNiD Node application already in production and deployed in Thailand, Myanmar, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, and other locations provides reliable identification of individuals based on a scan of their irises. We reliably produce a 12-digit unique numeric identifier (UNiD) for each individual that can be reliably used within other systems for healthcare, study tracking, work permits, and more. iRespond’s solution doesn’t track traditional PII attributes such as name, birth data, government ID, or address.

With this proposed project, the product will be extended to be able to produce an identity binding verifiable credential once an individual has had their irises scanned and after receiving a proof-of-DID-ownership (e.g., by signing a message with one of the keys listed in the DID Document). The credential would be similar to this: “IRespond and the Operator X attest that the individual with UNiD 123456789012 and did:cardano:addr1xyz appeared live and was identified with dual iris scan with extremely high confidence (with supporting false accept rate and false reject rate).”

This Identity Binding VC would be issued to the DID holder with a QR code and could be imported into the Atala PRISM wallet for later presentation, adding trust, especially when the verifier can also utilize iRespond’s UNiD Node to prove the individual’s UNiD identifier.

Services could be built on top of that basic VC to also attest/notarize existing government-issued documents.

Many biometric service providers will be able to play in this ecosystem to accelerate the mass-scale adoption of Atala PRISM DIDs and VCs. Individuals, governments, and companies will not be vendor-locked. Nor BSP identity provider will have a treasure trove of PII. This is completely unlike India’s Aadhaar!

Addressing the Challenge Question

What will drive mass-scale adoption of decentralized IDs on Cardano? Biometric Identity Binding Credentials will help establish trust between the roles within an SSI ecosystem, especially between a verifier and a holder when the stakes are high, such as with property/real estate transfers or guardianship scenarios.

Milestones

3 months - Pilot deployment of 5 iRespond UNiD Nodes into an existing Cardano project, e.g. in Ethiopia schools.

6 months - Identity binding credentials issued and read by Atala PRISM. Public launch, assuming Atala PRISM features are public by then.

12 months - Solution deployment in pilot extended to end-to-end use cases of trusted issuers, holders, verifiers, and governance authorities. Additional deployments within India and SE Asia.

Budget

$30,000 for product development (mostly staffing)

$20,000 for pilot equipment, licensing for 5 years, and training

$25,000 for staff and travel consulting with other issuers, verifiers, and governance authorities, including developing trust framework and registries, if needed.