Handling credential issuer's that go offline

Issue #2147 open
Andres Olave created an issue

I raised this issue during IIW and I didnt feel i got a complete answer

I think that the credential use case requires adjustment of the spec to deal with credential issuer's that goes offline due to termination as an issuer, no longer being a going concern due to liquidation or similar event, rebranding, etc. In most of these cases the issued credentials are still valid.

If the Issuer goes offline the Entity Statement will no longer be available under the .well-known location. The spec says that trust can still be established by using the TA/Intermediary fetch and resolve endpoints.

Therefore i am looking for feedback on the following  3 suggestions:

  1. There should be additional exceptions added to 9 "Obtaining Federation Entity Configuration Information" for this case.
  2. Non-normative statements addressing the need for some federations to backup the Entity Configurations of their entities. I think that that the credential could look to refer to the federation fetch endpoint to use if the .well-known endpoint is not available. This seems related to `authority_hints` from an Entity Configuration, or `trust_anchor_id` of the OP uses when communicating to a client or resource server.
  3. Addition of claims to the Entity Statement that track historical trust in an entity or creation of a profile that refers to new claims that track trust establishment and termination over time such as `trust_validity: [{established_at: 1234832941, terminated_at: 1235833132}, {established_at: 1236001946}]`

thanks!

Comments (5)

  1. Vladimir Dzhuvinov

    Giuseppe De Marco recently talked about the idea to introduce a new endpoint / API to track trust changes in a federation over time. Similar to the historical keys endpoint.

  2. Michael Jones
    • changed status to open

    I'm confused by this issue, because the specification doesn't say anything about credential issuers.

    Are you asking for some way to determine status of an Entity, Andres?

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