Allow JSON-LD documents to "pin" their @contexts and @imports
Nobody has claimed this yet.
- Dominant language
- HTML
- Stars
- 139
- Forks
- 23
- PR merge metrics
- No merged PRs in 30d
Description
https://medium.com/@markus.sabadello/json-ld-vcs-are-not-just-json-4488d279be43 by @peacekeeper points out that if someone signs the bytes of a JSON-LD document, the recipient of that signature can't be confident they're reading the same meaning that the signer intended, because the @context value might have changed by the time they fetch it.
The Verifiable Credentials spec approaches this problem in https://w3c.github.io/vc-data-model/#base-context by saying that implementations must treat https://www.w3.org/ns/credentials/v2 as already-retrieved, and that the fixed version must have a particular hash. This works for that base context, but as @peacekeeper pointed out, VCs can still include other contexts that aren't constrained. This approach also isn't grounded in the JSON-LD algorithms, which just say to dereference the @contexts' values without this hash check.
https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-subresource-integrity/ solves this problem for subresources within HTML by allowing authors to specify the expected digest for the bytes of the subresource. Parts of that design might be useful for building a similar capability into JSON-LD.
It's also possible to cache the @contexts (and any other dereferenced fields, like @import) using their digests. https://hillbrad.github.io/sri-addressable-caching/sri-addressable-caching.html discusses some difficulties for the web context, but many of those might not apply to most JSON-LD use cases.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Read the JSON-LD algorithms referenced in the issue, then compare the linked VC base-context and Subresource Integrity designs. Done would require a decided, implementable specification approach for pinning @contexts and @imports, rather than choosing among the open alternatives described here.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- json
- Domain
- security
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100