Sponsor: IEEE Foothill Section Computer Society Chapter
Speaker: Dr. Salil Kanhere

Date: 26 Mar 2025
Time: 03:00 PM PDT to 04:00 PM PDT
Cost:
Location:
Reservations: IEEE
Summary:
Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) is an emerging, user-centric, decentralised identity approach affording entities greater control over their identity and data flow during digital interactions. For digital credentials to be widely accepted, there is a need for an end-to-end system that provides secure verification of the participant identities and credentials to increase trust and a data minimisation mechanism to reduce the risk of oversharing the credential data. The talk will first present an overview of the decentralised identity ecosystem. Next, we will introduce CredChain, a blockchain-based SSI platform that allows for the secure creation, sharing, and verification of credentials. Beyond verifying identities and credentials, the self-sovereign identity architecture allows users to have complete control over their credential data using a digital wallet, including the ability to selectively disclose part of credential data, as necessary. Current SSI solutions assume the issuers to be “official” entities (e.g., government agencies) who must follow a stringent process to vet their credentials. However, there is no systematic support for directing the same level of trust agencies for individual users who may issue credentials (e.g., delegation of access, consent letter) in the context of business processes. A verifier who relies on user-issued credentials to complete a business process (e.g., a postal worker handing over a parcel to someone other than the addressee) bears the risk of accepting these credentials without reliance on a trust agency. The last part of the talk presents a Verifiable Credential-based Trust Propagation Protocol (VCTP) that allows individual users to be trusted as verifiable issuers in the SSI platform by establishing a trust propagation credential template in the blockchain.

Bio: Dr. Salil Kanhere received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA. He is currently a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW Sydney, Australia. His research interests include the Internet of Things, cyber-physical systems, blockchain, pervasive computing, cybersecurity, and applied machine learning. Dr. Kanhere is also affiliated with CSIRO’s Data61 and the Cybersecurity Cooperative Research Centre.

He is a recipient of the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2020) and has authored over 250 peer-reviewed articles, delivered 50+ keynotes and technical tutorials, and co-authored the book Blockchain for Cyberphysical Systems (Artech House, 2020). His research has been cited over 10,300 times (h-index: 47) and has been featured in media outlets such as ABC News Australia, Wired, ZDNet, Medium, MIT Technology Review, and IEEE Spectrum.