Learning Digital Identity

Chapter 19. Smart Identity Agents

Previous chapters have discussed agents and their capabilities without saying much about how they work, other than to say they exchange messages. This chapter will discuss the protocol that agents use, DIDComm, and its importance in creating a self-sovereign internet. DIDComm is an encapsulating protocol—you can define other protocols that run in it. While I’ve focused on the role agents play in credential exchange, DIDComm’s properties make agents useful for more than that. I call agents that are used to participate in arbitrary protocol interactions smart agents.

I begin with a discussion of self-sovereign authority and its relationship to self-sovereign communication. Next you’ll learn about DIDComm messaging and its inherent support for defining protocols. Credential exchange protocols are just two of many possible protocols. The final part of the chapter discusses smart agents and their role in helping people operationalize their online relationships.

Self-Sovereign Authority

You might hear people talk about decentralized identity instead of using the name self-sovereign identity (SSI). The word sovereign has some negative connotations for some, and others just don’t understand what it means. Personally, I don’t like the word decentralized to describe identity systems, since decentralization is an implementation strategy, not an outcome or feature. In an answer I authored on Quora about Web3, I said:

While people often talk about decentralization ...