]> mesur.io

brent.zundel@gmail.com

Microsoft Corporation

pamela.dingle@microsoft.com

Security Secure Patterns for Internet CrEdentials next generation unicorn sparkling distributed ledger This specification defines the glue URI scheme and the rules for encoding these URIs. It also establishes the registries necessary for management of this scheme. About This Document The latest revision of this draft can be found at . Status information for this document may be found at . Discussion of this document takes place on the Secure Patterns for Internet CrEdentials Working Group mailing list (), which is archived at . Subscribe at . Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at .

Introduction Enterprise entity identifiers are myriad. With the increasing use of digitial credentials, there is a need for a common methodology for expressing these identifiers such that claims about and by such entities can be made in a consistent and interoperable manner. This specification defines a URI scheme that standardizes the expression of existing company entity identifers by providing a common representation format. It also establishes a registry for managing how existing company entity identification mechanisms relate to this scheme. Any company entity identifier whose identification mechanism has been registered as an authority identifier in the registry may be represented as a glue URI.

Conventions and Definitions The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here. The term "glue URI" is used to refer to a URI that uses the glue scheme. TODO: define external authority, company entity

Core Concepts Every glue URI, whether expressed as a string or encoded in binary MUST be comprised of the following components:

• The Authority Identifier
• The External Number

The Authority Identifier indicates the external authority responsible for assigning the External Number and the scheme used to do so. The External Number is the identifier assigned to the company by the external authority.

Uniqueness and Namespacing Each glue URI MUST be globally unique. It is assumed that most registered company entity identification schemes already handle any necessary namespacing as part of the external number. However, in the event that collisions are possible within the set of possible external identifiers for an authority identifier scheme, then further namespacing might be necessary at the glue id level. Such namespacing SHOULD be done on the authority identifier as part of the registration process. That is, the different namespaces would be considered either different schemes operated by the same authority, or the same scheme operated by different authorities. In either case a unique authority identifier would be necessary for each. For example, assume there is an external authority FEA that provides identifiers for company entities in USA and Canada. The identifiers in the USA are unique, and the identifiers in Canada are unique, but there is no guarantee that a company entity in Canada won't be assigned the same number as a company entity in the USA. Upon registration of FEA as an Authority Identifier, it would be necessary to seperately register FEA-USA and FEA-Can to provide differentiation between the two sets of external numbers.

Text Encoding of glue URIs All glue URIs comply with and are therefore represented by a scheme identifier and a scheme-specific part. The scheme identifier is: glue, and the scheme-specific parts are represented as a sequence of alphanumeric components separated by the '.' character. A formal definition is provided in the next section, but it can informally be considered as: glue:<authority-identifier>.<external-number> The Authority Identifier MUST be an alphanumeric string from the "Scheme" field of the glue URI Authority Identifier registry. The External Number MUST be the identifier assigned to the company by the external authority under the identified scheme.

glue URI Scheme Text Syntax TODO ABNF

DIDs and glue TODO DIDs and glue

Security Considerations TODO Security

Privacy Considerations

Private identifiers as corporate identifiers There are some corporate identifers which make use of personal identifiers. This is the case for registered sole-proprietor businesses in much of the United States, where the business identifier may be the same as the social-security-number of the business owner. It is possible for such identifers to be represented as glue URIs. An identifier's expression as a glue URI does not change the privacy characteristics of that identifier. The same cautions and concerns need to be taken with the glue URI representation as with the original identifier. Implementers storing or evaluating glue ids are encouraged to evaluate the privacy characteristics of each identification scheme represented by an authority identifier and to appropriately handle any glue id which violates privacy policies.

IANA Considerations The following sections detail requests to IANA for the creation of a new registry and registration of the 'glue' URI scheme.

'glue' URI Scheme Registration TODO

'glue' Scheme URI authority registry IANA is requested to create a new registry entitled "'glue' Scheme URI Authority Identifiers". The registration policy for this registry is Expert Review as defined in . Each entry in this registry associates one or more Authority Identifiers with a single organization. Within the registry, the organization is identified using the "Name" field. Each identified organization will be associated with one or more number of company identification schemes, which are listed in the "Scheme" field. A reference for each scheme is listed in the "Reference" field of the registry. The initial values for the registry are: ### Guidance for Designated Experts It is not required that registration of an Authority Identifier be done by a representative of the external authority.

URI Scheme Registration The "glue" URI scheme is requested to be registered in the provisional "URI Schemes" registry. The information below is provided according to the guidelines from RFC 4395: * URI scheme name: glue * Status: provisional * URI scheme syntax: See Section 4.1 of Text Encoding of glue URIs

Normative References A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a compact sequence of characters that identifies an abstract or physical resource. This specification defines the generic URI syntax and a process for resolving URI references that might be in relative form, along with guidelines and security considerations for the use of URIs on the Internet. The URI syntax defines a grammar that is a superset of all valid URIs, allowing an implementation to parse the common components of a URI reference without knowing the scheme-specific requirements of every possible identifier. This specification does not define a generative grammar for URIs; that task is performed by the individual specifications of each URI scheme. [STANDARDS-TRACK] Many protocols make use of points of extensibility that use constants to identify various protocol parameters. To ensure that the values in these fields do not have conflicting uses and to promote interoperability, their allocations are often coordinated by a central record keeper. For IETF protocols, that role is filled by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). To make assignments in a given registry prudently, guidance describing the conditions under which new values should be assigned, as well as when and how modifications to existing values can be made, is needed. This document defines a framework for the documentation of these guidelines by specification authors, in order to assure that the provided guidance for the IANA Considerations is clear and addresses the various issues that are likely in the operation of a registry. This is the third edition of this document; it obsoletes RFC 5226. In many standards track documents several words are used to signify the requirements in the specification. These words are often capitalized. This document defines these words as they should be interpreted in IETF documents. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. RFC 2119 specifies common key words that may be used in protocol specifications. This document aims to reduce the ambiguity by clarifying that only UPPERCASE usage of the key words have the defined special meanings.

Acknowledgments TODO acknowledge.