of utmost importance and is kept secure in a wallet application . Furthermore , another important aspect to consider is the storage location of the public key . This is answered by Hyperledger Indy [ 7 ], which serves as the trusted public storage for information that needs to be available publicly and provides with a mechanism to ascertain the most recent publicly trusted information .
2.3 HYPERLEDGER INDY
Of the many projects by the Linux Foundation around trust technologies , Hyperledger Indy focuses on digital identities and VCs . After initial contribution by the Sovrin Foundation [ 7 ], interest in this project has expanded exponentially with several industry experts contributing and evolving the infrastructure for modern digital identities and credentials .
The verifiable data registry for the VC that TSX utilizes is a blockchain , where copies of data are distributed across several blockchain nodes . The decentralized ledger would serve as the source of trust for publicly available information . The reason to keep it public is to enable anyone to read the information related to public keys of the entities or read the credential schemas , which can be verified by anyone . Information about credential revocation is also pushed onto the distributed ledger so that everyone can access the latest information . In summary , the decentralized ledger acts as a point of trust , from where the authorized entities can read the information needed for verification . However , no actual PCF data is stored in the decentralized ledger .
2.4 DIGITAL WALLETS FOR VERIFIABLE CREDENTIALS
A wallet is a software application , which runs on a computing hardware that enables the subject to hold the VCs that are issued to it . A wallet can hold multiple credentials from different issuers . It also can search for the credential attributes , which would satisfy the verifier request for ’ s authentication .
There are different ideas evolving for wallet application . Some are designed for smart phones , while others focus on cloud platforms . For more information refer to the Hyperledger Aries Project , which is at the forefront of developing wallets for applications based on Hyperledger Indy [ 8 ].
2.5 MOTIVATION TO USE THE VC TECHNOLOGY
Talking about a centralized platform , includes the reliance on a single party controlling the platform . This does not distribute trust over multiple parties and is not accepted in industries anymore . For this reason , such a centralized approach is avoided .
Using the X . 509 certificates to provide verifiable PCFs is a strong contender . However , there are few shortfalls : Firstly , the setup of the Certificate Authority ( CA ) for each certifier is an added IT cost which they might not want to undertake . Secondly , there needs to be an application layer on top of the certificates to aid in the exchange . ESTAINIUM association could undertake standardization for such a layer , however , it would be a huge effort .
36 January 2023