Unlocking the Power of DID-Linked Resources with Vidos and cheqd

As our lives become more connected to our digital counterparts, secure and verifiable identities are critical. Vidos is excited to be partnering with cheqd to make identity solutions more reliable and interoperable, by making it easier for developers and relying parties to use DID-Linked Resources.

By working together we’re building a world where digital identities are secure, accessible and universal. We’re allowing individuals and organisations to interact online without sacrificing privacy or security. A big step towards a more connected digital world where identity solutions can be easily integrated with one another.

What are DID Linked Resources?

DID (Decentralized Identifier) Linked Resources (DLRs) are an emerging part of the digital identity landscape, recently becoming a draft W3C specification. Resources are pieces of information linked to a DID that can provide additional context or evidence for relying parties verifying verifiable credentials. In short, DLRs are building blocks that make digital identities more trustworthy and functional.

In the digital identity landscape DID-Linked Resources are important for:

1. ‍Adding Contextual Information to DIDs: DLRs provide the capability to link critical, relevant information to DIDs, such as schemas for verifiable credentials, status lists, trust registries, governance policies and visual display schemas for credentials.
2. ‍Increasing Trust in and Reliability of Resources: Each DLR is cryptographically signed by the verification method keys of the DID Controller, therefore relying parties can have full confidence that a DLR is associated with a particular DID and is therefore legitimate. In addition, DLRs can be grouped together into lists, where a new version of a DLR can be tied to previous versions. This allows for indexing and historical versioning. Upon verification of a credential, relying parties can verify the integrity and existence of multiple referenced DLRs, making it easy and reliable to run checks such as the credential validity and revocation status, or against the permissions and accreditations of the credential issuer under a a particular governance framework.
3. ‍Increasing the Interoperability of Verification Solutions: Since the DLR standard builds on the foundation of DID Core and the DID Resolution Specification, existing applications that are able to resolve DIDs can use the same techniques to resolve and dereference to DID-Linked Resources. This means that additional functionality (such as status lists and trust registries) can be integrated and validated by relying parties, without any breaking changes to how classic DIDs are resolved.

For more details on the applications for DLRs see: Context for developing DLRs.

Why Vidos Partnered with cheqd

We partnered with cheqd because we share the same vision of the digital identity landscape. The core of this partnership is to improve the ecosystem for developers and end users, so that we can enable the global adoption of secure, reliable and verifiable digital identities. By working together we are able to use the strengths of both approaches, our combined knowledge, and our growing networks to accelerate the adoption of new digital identity technologies.

Leveraging cheqd’s and Vidos’ robust and secure infrastructure, we aim to improve how critical resources are stored, referenced, and retrieved. This partnership enhances the reliability and accessibility of digital identity resources, which is crucial for their widespread adoption and usage. Together we empower individuals and organisations to access decentralised identity ecosystems and obtain greater control over their digital identities and data.

Key Benefits

1. Seamless Verification across Multiple DID Methods, Credential Standards and Blockchains: Vidos services now support verification of W3C VCs and Anoncreds, so that they can be verified and validated without having to stand up and manage multiple infrastructure stacks. Supporting DLRs means developers can build tools and applications that work across different systems and add innovative functionality to their solutions, such as fully traversable and historically indexable status lists, schemas and trust registries.
2. Global Standards Compliance: Our partnership is W3C DID Core standard compliant. By being standard compliant we ensure our solutions are compatible with existing and emerging digital identity frameworks so relying parties can ensure they’re future-ready. By following best practices within W3C DID Core and the DID Resolution Spec, DID-Linked Resources act as an add-on to applications that support DIDs, with no breaking changes to the DID or DID Document data structure.
3. Enterprise grade SLA for Robust and Reliable Tools: Vidos and cheqd provide enterprise grade service level agreements so the tools and solutions built on our platforms are robust, reliable and enterprise ready.

Example Use Case: Solving for Trust Registries

A trust registry is essential for verifying and managing trusted entities within an ecosystem. It establishes trust in digital transactions and interactions because it holds the reliable information about individuals, organisations, credentials and other relevant data to prove verification and authorisation claims. However, the lack of standard for Trust Registries creates fragmentation and limits interoperability across ecosystems. Different consortia have taken contrasting approaches, such as EBSI Trust Chains, TRAIN and OpenID Federation, which, although functional, rely on centralised or federated control of the trust registry that makes it hard for companies outside of the federation to trust the identifiers in the registry.

Using DID-Linked Resources we can overcome the problem of contrasting approaches by harmonising the resolution interface for resolving to different Trust Registry models and approaches.

• DID-Linked Resources enable ledger-based Trust Registries that are fully resolvable, traversable and cryptographically verifiable. This allows organisations to use the benefits of on-chain, persistent and verifiable lists and resources while using a common syntax to identify and retrieve them across any ledger-based DID method. For example an organisation can create a Trusted Issuer List within a "Collection" of "Resources" associated and linked to their DID. This list can be easily accessed and verified by other parties in the ecosystem, reducing the need for central authorities.
• The DID-Linked Resources specification also provides a set of query parameters to identify and retrieve different derivations of digital resources associated with a DID. This allows for rich filtering and querying capabilities to manage and scale Trust Registries as the ecosystem grows.

By leveraging the combined tools of DID-Linked Resources, a robust DLT like cheqd, and Vidos’ verifiable identity services, relying parties can easily orchestrate and build secure, interoperable foundations for digital credential ecosystems. This approach addresses the current fragmentation issues and provides a way to manage and verify trust across different consortia and implementations. For more use cases see: Cheqd: DID Linked Resources.

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Get in touch with us to see what you can do with DID-Linked Resources. Whether you’re a developer looking to integrate these resources into your project or an organisation looking for digital identity solutions, Vidos and cheqd have got you covered.