Chapter Three: Attesting with Edges
Claims and other credentials offer crucial support for an XID. They reveal the experience of the person behind the digital identity; learning about that improves progressive trust.
To date, this course has focused on detached claims. Often this is because claims are small enough that they shouldn't be cluttering up the XID Document that's fundamental to the description of an identity. But sometimes it's because claims are sensitive and may need to be hidden in various ways.
This isn't always the case. There are claims (and other data) that are important enough that they should be linked to the XID in a more permanent way. They can still be elided: any data on a XID can be redacted to ensure data minimization. But, because of their importance, they need be embedded within the XID rather than being separate.
This chapter will discuss a variety of ways to add data to a XID using edges, which are a methodology for placing a claim directly on a XID.
Major Objectives for this Chapter
After working through this chapter, a developer will be able to:
- Create self-attestation edges
- Create peer endorsement edges
- Extract attestations from XIDs
Supporting objectives include the ability to:
- Know different methodologies for linking data to XIDs
- Understand what provenance marks can do (and what they can't)
- Understand the difference between self-attestations and peer endorsements
- Know the value of relationship transparency