Attestations and endorsements make claims about digital identities. They don’t necessarily tell us who an identity is, but they tell us what an identity can do and whether they’ve been successful or not in the past. They’re especially important for public participation profiles.
Why Are Attestations & Endorsements Important?
The New Yorker once wrote “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. That’s true whether your identity is pseudonymous or theoretically based on your physical world identity. In both cases, you need to be able to convince people online of your credentials, whether that’s proving that you speak knowledgeably on your favorite technical (or fandom) threads or offering more explicit credentials for a job (or volunteer position).
Experience and published products associated with your digital identity can do this, but often you need a bootstrap to get there. That’s where attestations and endorsements come in. They can prove an identity is who you say it is, they can validate your experience, they can just speak to your character, and they can gain weight over time as part of a network of trust.
Common uses of attestations & endorsements include:
- Professional Skill Endorsements: Verifying technical capabilities or domain expertise.
- Contribution Validations: Confirming specific work on projects.
- Behavioral Testimonials: Attesting to how someone works and collaborates.
- Credential Confirmations: Validating education or certifications, potentially without revealing identity.
- Reputation Transfers: Allowing trusted introducers to vouch for someone.
These are critical stepping stones for making digital identity work.
How Do Attestations & Endorsements Work?
Claims about digital identity can come in two sorts: self-attestations and third-party endorsements. These claims are then typically attached to an identifier, such as XIDs.
Self-Attestations
Self-attestations are claims you make about yourself, your work, or your capabilities. While necessary, they have inherent limitations in building trust because they come from the subject of the claim and they require external validation to be truly trusted.
The best self-attestations include:
- Clear statements of capability or experience.
- Contextual information about how the capability was developed.
- Limitations and boundaries of the claimed expertise.
- Verifiable evidence when possible (without compromising privacy).
- Transparency about potential biases.
See the Fair Witness Methodology for more on writing strong claims of all sorts.
Verifiable Self-Attestations
Self-attestations can gain weight if they are verifiable, offering some way for third parties to check the claims. This kind of self-endorsement bridges the gap between pure self-attestation and peer endorsement by:
- Making specific claims about contributions.
- Providing transparent verification methods.
- Linking to public, independently verifiable evidence.
Peer Endorsements
Endorsements are attestations made by others about you or your work. They implicitly provide some level of verification, depending on the trust level of the third-party endorser. They can provide diverse viewpoints on the same work, and they build layers of verification over time. Additionally, peer endorsements form the foundation of public participation profiles.
Because peer endorsements were not made by the subject, they should be accepted by the subject if they are to become part of the subject’s identity information. This acceptance model ensures that the recipient maintains control over their identity. This is usually done via a chain of signatures: the endorser signed the original claim, then the subject signed its acceptance. This chain of signatures creates a verifiable trust path.
The requirement for acceptance doesn’t mean that the identity holder has total control over endorsements. Other people can make whatever claims they want. The subject just controls whether the endorsement (or other claim) is tightly linked to their identity information.
Trust Networks
The power of this model of self-attestations and endorsements comes from combining multiple claims over an extended period of time. A user can make their own self-attestations to define the core of their identity, that identity is then directly endorsed, and those endorsers are themselves endorsed, proving their credibility. New attestations and endorsements progressively accrue over time, solidifying the trust in an identity.
A trust network can then be verified by the following steps:
- Verify Self-Attestation Signatures: Confirm an identity holder signed their own claims.
- Verify Endorsement Signatures: Confirm each endorser signed their endorsements.
- Check Acceptance Signatures: Verify the XID holder accepted and signed each endorsement.
- Evaluate Context and Disclosures: Review methodologies, limitations, and potential biases as discussed in the Fair Witness Methodology.
- Check External References: Verify any external evidence that was referenced.
- Consider Multiple Perspectives: Look for consistency across different endorsers.
Attestation & Endorsement Links
Learning Attestations from the Command Line:
- Learning Attestations
- Learning XIDs: Making Claims (course)
- Learning XIDs: Attesting with Edges (course)
Related Technologies
Standards