🧩 1. What are the problems to solve in this domain?
Technical Problems (Overview only)
- Deniable Presentation: Support plausible deniability for both issuance and presentation to protect users from coercion or surveillance.
- Everlasting Privacy: Ensure that personal data remains private even if current cryptographic schemes are broken in the PQ future.
- Long VC Validity Periods: Design verifiable credential systems that remain secure and manageable over long lifespans without overloading revocation mechanisms.
- Blind Issuance / Blind Signatures: Enable issuance of credentials to prevent the issuer from learning or linking to future presentations.
- Secure Multi-VC Linking: Allow users to prove information across multiple credentials without leaking data. (PODs)
- Centralized Wallet Secure Cryptographic Device (WSCD) Attacks Descaling: Reduce reliance on single secure components (e.g., TEE, HSMs, SEs) to avoid centralized attack surfaces.
- Communication & Trust-Minimized Verification: Enable offline, decentralized verification and reduce dependency on centralized trust infrastructures.
- Revocation: Scalable, privacy-preserving mechanisms for invalidating credentials.
- Guardianship: Delegated control of digital identities (e.g., for minors or vulnerable adults) while preserving user autonomy and privacy.
- PKI - Key Rotation: Secure, user-friendly updating or rotating of cryptographic keys without compromising existing credentials.
- Differential Privacy Analysis: Understand and minimize identity leakages in metadata and usage patterns.
- Threat Modeling: Holistic analysis of attack surfaces and adversary capabilities for identity
- Interactive proving
Some of these are non- ethereum specific/related but critical to realize end goals.
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Expanded Here: zkID open problems
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Ecosystem Problems
- Governments adopting legacy architectures are unwilling to adopt cryptography that is not standardized
- Lack of coordination across formats: Each project uses incompatible VC and Blockchain DID formats.