navigator-identity-proposal.md

⚠️ This proposal has been superseded ⚠️

• Please refer to the Digital identities spec instead. It represents the community's consensus.

Alternate design

This is an alternative design that further optimizes the decoupling of identity verification and authentication (so that developers get a clear signal about their differences), while still accomplishing the goal of being able to request multiple identity schemes (e.g., mdocs, vcs, and federation) at the same time in a single dialog.

In this proposal, we create a new namespace for identity verification, say navigator.identity, as opposed to integrate with the existing authentication-oriented Credential Manager being used by WebAuthn, WebOTP and FedCM.

NOTE: an alternative (and compatible) variation is to introduce a navigator.credentials.getIdentity() method that has the same structure as this.

const result = await navigator.identity.get({
  dc: {
    selector: {
      format: ["mdoc"],
      doctype: "org.iso.18013.5.mDL",
      fields: ["org.iso.18013.5.1.family_name"]
    },
    params: {
      nonce: "1234",
      readerPublicKey: "567"
    },
  }
});

NOTE: should / how would we factor in here federated identities?

In this variation, there is no API affordance for a developer to make the mistake of requesting identity verification and authentication mechanisms at the same time.