- Authors: Keith Smith
- Status: ACCEPTED
- Since: 2024-05-01
- Status Note: Initial proposal after discussion on rocketchat
- Supersedes:
- Start Date: 2018-08-12
- Tags: feature, protocol
This RFC defines the message format which an issuer uses to notify a holder that a previously issued credential has been revoked.
- 20240320: Clarification removing references to retired
~please_ack
decorator and RFC.
We need a standard protocol for an issuer to notify a holder that a previously issued credential has been revoked.
For example, suppose a passport agency revokes Alice's passport. The passport agency (an issuer) may want to notify Alice (a holder) that her passport has been revoked so that she knows that she will be unable to use her passport to travel.
The Revocation Notification protocol is a very simple protocol consisting of a single message:
- Revoke - issuer to holder
This simple protocol allows an issuer to choose to notify a holder that a previously issued credential has been revoked.
It is the issuer's prerogative whether or not to notify the holder that a credential has been revoked. It is not a security risk if the issuer does not notify the holder that the credential has been revoked, nor if the message is lost. The holder will still be unable to use a revoked credential without this notification.
There are two parties involved in a Revocation Notification: issuer
and holder
.
The issuer
sends the revoke
message to the holder
.
The revoke
message sent by the issuer
to the holder
is as follows:
{
"@type": "https://didcomm.org/revocation_notification/1.0/revoke",
"@id": "<uuid-revocation-notification>",
"thread_id": "<thread_id>",
"comment": "Some comment"
}
Description of fields:
-
thread_id
(required) -- the thread ID of the issue-credential-v2 protocol which was used to issue one or more credentials that have been revoked by the issuer. If multiple credentials were issued, each credential has a different credential format but contains the same claims as described here; therefore, this message notifies the holder that all of these credentials have been revoked. -
comment
(optional) -- a field that provides some human readable information about the revocation notification. This is typically the reason for the revocation as deemed appropriate by the issuer.
- See the issue-credential-v2 protocol.
- See the thread ID description.
- See the Please ACK Decorator RFC.
If we later added support for more general event subscription and notification message flows, this would be redundant.
- Why is this design the best in the space of possible designs? It is simple.
- What other designs have been considered and what is the rationale for not choosing them? A more general event subscription and notification mechanism was considered but chose to keep this simple for the same reasons that the basic message was kept simple.
- What is the impact of not doing this? There is no standard way of sending a revocation notification which is a common scenario.
The following lists the implementations (if any) of this RFC. Please do a pull request to add your implementation. If the implementation is open source, include a link to the repo or to the implementation within the repo. Please be consistent in the "Name" field so that a mechanical processing of the RFCs can generate a list of all RFCs supported by an Aries implementation.
Name / Link | Implementation Notes |
---|---|