DIDComm Messaging is a powerful way for people, institutions, and IoT things to interact via machine-readable messages, using features of decentralized identifiers (DIDs) as the basis of security and privacy. It works over any transport: HTTP, BlueTooth, SMTP, raw sockets, and sneakernet, for example.
This repo is where we develops specs and reference code to explain DIDComm Messaging. Some of the work incubated here is likely to be standardized at IETF or in other places.
Browse the latest rendered draft of the spec here.
View the spec markdown outline here.
View the rendered draft of the Implementer's Guide here.
The specs we're working on are broken into sections. Each section is a separate markdown document. Sections evolve independently through this status sequence:
PROPOSED → REFINING → STABLE
Adding new content with the PROPOSED status is very easy and fast: just submit a PR that passes a smell test of reasonableness for one or more maintainers.
The REFINING status is applied after WG discussion, when there is rough consensus on the amount and type of content in a section. Github issues are used for discussion.
The WG moves sections to STABLE status once they have code/tests, implementations, quiet trends in github issues, and other indicators that they are polished and unlikely to change much. See here for more details.
Contributors to the repo come from DIF's DIDComm Working Group. Here is our charter, and here are some more details about how we work.
Our working group meets each Monday at 12 pm PST / 9 pm CET at https://zoom.us/j/199841436. A rolling agenda is here. You can also find us at https://dif.slack.com and on our mailing list at didcomm-wg@dif.groups.io. Anybody is welcome to listen in; however, we need IPR protections around what we build, to keep it free from patent encumbrances -- so if you'd like to contribute more formally, please email membership@identity.foundation.
DIDComm Messaging is the first in a potential family of related specs; others could include DIDComm Streaming, DIDComm Multicast, and so forth. DIDComm is the common adjective for all of them, meaning that all will share DID mechanisms as the basis of security.