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ORIGINAL VISION:
In support of producers of consumer goods and purchasers of mineral resources who desire to prove the responsible sourcing of mineral resources, as well as internal government learning regarding the community effort to establish a better way to find, issue, store and share trustworthy data via Verifiable Credentials, the Mines Digital Trust POC of issuing verified credentials for Mines Act Permits and any related observable data metrics of the mine site was initiated.
People want to know where things come from. Producers of mineral resources want to prove they are a responsible source. The purchasers of those mineral resources want to prove this to their customers. Establishing this provenance and related attribution is challenging. But, new technologies are available that enable this digital trust. It requires a community effort to improve how we exchange trustworthy data. Verifiable Credentials are one these technologies which will enable digital trust. We have created a team with members from Government, Industry and Academia. This team is our advisory committee on the Mines Digital Trust project. We will test the results of using verifiable credentials to conduct business. We will measure the value of our ability to verify origin without checking with the issuer of the data. We are starting with verifiable credentials for the following categories:
- Mine Permit Authorizations
- Climate Change Reporting
- Health and Safety Protocols
ORIGINAL VERSION:
The Mines Digital Trust project is building a proof of concept using a blockchain technology called Hyperledger to enable a handful of program areas within the BC Government to add a higher level of trust to their current business processes. To start with BC Registries issued a Verifiable Credential for every registered company in BC. This web application https://orgbook.gov.bc.ca/ constitutes a digital wallet that holds verified credentials from issuers like, for example, BC Registries or a permitting officer in the BC Government. Currently this is strictly for public information only. In this project we are looking to issue a few “verifiable credentials” into The Orgbook which will be linked to the existing registered businesses and provide a starting point for building a digital trust ecosystem. This ecosystem will grow into businesses holding their own credentials obtained from various issuers like BC Registries or WorksafeBC, and will allow for a new kind of business to business sharing of the information. One where they choose to share only the information they wish and without needing to go back to the issuer to get it or confirm its validity.
The Mines Digital Trust team is using a blockchain-based technology called Hyperledger ARIES. It enables a higher level of trust, security and privacy for our business processes. A production example in use today is the web application https://orgbook.gov.bc.ca/. Within this the Provincial Government has issued verifiable credentials for every BC company.
Digital wallets holding verified credentials are special in their use of cryptography. These special digital wallets use blockchain to verify four elements of digital trust:
- Who issued a credential?
- Who was the credential issued to?
- Check for any credential tampering
- Check if the issuer revoked the credential
The holder keeps all other credential data in a secure digital wallet, not on the blockchain.
The Orgbook provided a starting point for building a digital trust ecosystem. The next step is to expand the ecosystem so businesses can hold, issue and verify credentials. This creates a gold standard for trusted business to business information sharing. This new approach allows for selective disclosure. This means you can choose to limit the attributes you share to those required for the process. Decentralized identity solutions allow businesses to automate credential verification. Furthermore, it removes call backs to the issuer.
The purpose of this project is to explore the use of the Hyperledger blockchain solution and verifiable credentials to build out a responsible sourcing assessment tool. If successful, further investment will be made to issue additional verifiable credentials for data objects needed by industry to meet the increasing demands for responsible sourcing and traceability in the supply chain.
In the long term we would like to issue these verifiable credentials and have organizations pull them down to their own digital wallets. Since the use of digital wallets is new and we needed a digital wallet in order to have a place to hold the credentials, we created a digital wallet to hold all the business registration credentials. As businesses start running their own digital wallets, they will be able to save them in their own digital wallet.
At its core this project is about identity. Validating the identity of issuers of authorizations, permits, licences, and other relationships like membership, employment or accreditation. With this validation of identity we can determine the origin of materials used to produce consumer goods and help to drive demand for products produced by companies striving for responsible sourcing.
The BC Government recognizes that this goal will be successful only with the coordinated efforts of governments, industries and academia.
The issuer of a credential has to run some software that can create a verifiable credential and the cryptographic keys, and be registered to be able to submit the credential to the Orgbook digital wallet. The issuer defines a set of attributes that will be submitted with the verifiable credential and used to provide context and explain the implications of its issuance. The issuer can then programmatically trigger a request from its parent software application each time it wishes to issue or revoke a credential. The cryptographic keys created with the hyperledger components are what go up on the blockchain ledger and enable proving who issued it.