Automation processes and the transformation of professions and industries will lead to a significant change in the working lives of employees; further specialization will see more focused areas of competence. To ensure the meaningfulness and presentability of learning outcomes, our goal is to create a system that maps skills and competencies to established taxonomies such as esco to make those outcomes comparable and visible on a certificate.
To keep participants' information within the credentials issued secure and tamper-free, we will use a Quorum blockchain that supports smart contracts. Moving forward, its distributed ledger architecture will serve both as a means to ensure the identities of actors involved (DIDs) and prevent alterations of credentials (VCs). We aim at keeping our system independent from third parties using a centralized system.
Cryptographically, our system will use zero knowledge and range proofs to facilitate compliance with GDPR regulation to maintain data sparsity. This will also allow for selective disclosure. We aim at being post-quantum-ready.
Different blockchain implementations can be classified based on their properties of scalability, decentralization, and security. These three properties cannot be maximized simultaneously in one system: Increasing decentralization by adding nodes reduces security. As requirements for these properties may be evaluated differently in similar use cases, we chose to make the blockchain technology used configurable. Our setup has high scalabilty resulting in reduced decentralization and security. Decentralized identifiers (DIDs) aim at overcoming disadvantages of a PKI, such as a high centralization resulting in hierarchization and vulnerability of trust instances. Using DIDs in a blockchain-based PKI (DPKI) solves these drawbacks, providing a highly distributed log system based on smart contracts.
The second layer solution on top of a blockchain – the Sidetree – will enable the use of verifiable DIDs that can be uniquely associated with documents, while reducing the capacity to store public keys.