PhD: Completed It!

February 03, 2023

2022 marked the end of a big chapter of my life. The culmination of my PhD journey, easily the most challenging project I have ever undertaken. Alongside graduating from my PhD as a Doctor of Philosophy, this year I formalised my relationship as a…

Thoughts and Ideas on the Memory of Things

March 06, 2021

An idea has been maturing in my thoughts for a while now. Or rather I have been thinking about a series of ideas, programming projects I would love to actualise, which I recently realised share a common thread. Memory and how we access it. Probably…

Nobody is in Control

July 16, 2020

My first attempt at the Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas. Scary… I was nervous and I know I could have conveyed my thoughts with more clarity and coherence. I virtually missed out my section on trust - our way of navigating the uncertainties of our…

IIW XXX

May 08, 2020

I finally made it to the Internet Identity Workshop. A three day unconference based on open space technology that has been running twice a year for the last 15 years. It’s a bit like a pilgrimage for the identity community. I am going to struggle to…

Are You in Control?

April 05, 2020

As our data continues to be collected, exchanged, stored, sold and analysed, are we giving away more than we can comprehend? Do we have control over our digital lives? What would that even look like? Join Will Abramson (Edinburgh Napier University…

Designing Secure and Usable Credential Schema

March 23, 2020

The Self-Sovereign identity space is still very much in its infancy, however, the technology behind it is maturing and the developer tools available are growing every day. The reason this space is still in its infancy is that real-world…

Verifiable Image Attributes Using IPFS

March 20, 2020

This is a quick(ish) explainer and how-to guide for including images inside a Verifiable Credential attribute in such a way that a Verifier can load the image and verify it is the same as the image attested to by the issuer. The problem with an image…

Developing Identity Systems Using Hyperledger Aries

March 18, 2020

TLDR: if you are going to read one thing the read this about the general Trust over IP stack Hyperledger Aries is an open source project and specification for developing software agents that can communicate across secure cryptographic channels. The…

Our NHS & You

March 17, 2020

Each of us can trace some connection to the National Health Service here in the UK. This institution created back in 1948 has been a beacon to the world. The NHS showed what healthcare could and should look like in the 20th century. Maybe it’s time…

What is Digital Identity?

March 03, 2020

Digital identity and identity are two distinctly different things. Our identity is all-encompassing, ephemeral, and constantly shifting as we reinvent ourselves based on our past experiences and current circumstances. Identity is a concept that…

Getting Started With MIRACL Core

December 15, 2019

Over the last few weeks I have been getting to grips with the MIRACL core cryptography library - which describes itself as: MIRACL Core is a multi-lingual and architecturally agnostic Cryptographic library that supports elliptic curve cryptography…

Facebook Erased Me

December 04, 2019

Last month I got erased from Facebook. No warning. No communication. Just one day when I tried to login I was faced with this message: Leaving me thinking, hmm that’s weird, probably just a mistake I don’t see why my account would be disabled. I…

PhD Thesis Proposal: Evaluating Identity Ecosystems

September 24, 2019

This is a brief summary of my current research focus and objectives for the rest of my PhD - I have two years. I write this in preparation for the MyData 2019 conference and would welcome feedback, comments and questions. If you are at the conference…

Reflections on the BIL Conference

September 10, 2019

Our lab’s recent conference was the culmination of its first year in existence. A celebration of what we have learnt and a recognition of the challenges we still have to overcome. It was not perfect, there were some technical issues and timing was…

A Long Overdue Update

April 26, 2019

It’s been a while since I took a step back and reflected on my progress and development as a researcher and generally a learner in the fast-moving field of identity, cryptography and everything in between. A lot has happened. A whole university term…

MyData comes to Scotland

March 22, 2019

Last week the MyData community meeting and general meeting were held in Scotland. It was the first community meeting I have attended and the first time the newly elected board of MyData global met face to face. This combined with the timing of the…

Rebooting the Web of Trust 8 - Barcelona

March 11, 2019

Rebooting the Web of Trust was a melting pot of ideas where experts from across the identity community come together to develop whitepapers and code addressing some of the most pressing issues in the space. Probably the best community, conference…

CL Signatures for Anonymous Credentials

January 14, 2019

A CL Signature is a signature scheme developed by Jan Camenisch and Anna Lysyanskaya. This scheme has some properties that make it ideal for use in an anonymous credential system and is, in fact, the scheme that Sovrin, and I am sure others…

Strong Authentication and Identity Workshop

December 18, 2018

My first experience of the standards world at the W3C. It was not what I expected, but a worthwhile experience that I have a lot to learn from. Developing standards is clearly a tough business. The challenge is to develop a small, inter-operable…

Establishing MyData Scotland

December 17, 2018

I have been working towards officially establishing MyData Scotland with help from Thomas Presslie, Iain Henderson and others. We recently went through our peer acceptance interview. It got us thinking and talking about what MyData means to us and…

BIL Lab Week 10

December 10, 2018

A less academic week I would say. More a week of meetings and organisation. Both necessary and productive though. I had a couple of MyData communications this week. A call to discuss hosting the general meeting. I hope I can come through on this…

W3C Identity Workshop Position Statement

December 04, 2018

I am hugely looking forward to attending the W3C Workshop on Strong Authentication and Identity. It is going to be a place for me to validate my current ideas and understanding of the identity space with a group of experts. I hope that it will be a…

BIL Lab Week 9

December 03, 2018

This week went well. I actually don’t know if it was too different from the other weeks but things seem to be falling into place. I certainly felt better about my PhD than I have for a while. We had a public MyData Edinburgh meeting, that while…

BIL Lab Week 8

November 26, 2018

So, I started writing my literature review. If you can call it writing. I am certainly not adept at academic writing yet, but hopefully, I will learn. My current progress is more a collection of half garbled sentences or paragraphs that hopefully…

BIL Lab Week 7

November 18, 2018

Better from me. Not perfect, but much better. I followed a routine this week. I defined my weekly and daily goals and managed to achieve most of them. One of those goals was to read more. Well, I am currently reading four different books, three non…

BIL Lab Week 6

November 11, 2018

This was a bad week. Lack of concentraction. Lack of focus. I really struggled. I think I was still feeling the effects of a long weekend. I went back home, went out wth my friends then moved all my stuff up to Edinburgh. I took the Monday off to…

BIL Lab Week 5

November 02, 2018

I started my week feeling fairly lost. Bill mentioned something called Attribute-Based Encryption. Which sounds great, you define a set of attributes which are encrypted and allow access to a system based on the presentation of a specific set of…

BIL Lab Week 4

October 29, 2018

This week was a mixed bag. Well, that’s how it felt on Friday, but on reflection perhaps I did more than I thought. I completed my first implementation of a zero-knowledge proof which I am pretty proud of. Take a look at the code, I tried to comment…

BIL Lab Week 3

October 22, 2018

It has been encouraging week for me, I am starting to see some real progress. Particularly my Rust development. Although also my Zero Knowledge knowledge has come a long way. Concepts that were foreign to me are becoming recognisable and even…

BIL Lab Week 2

October 14, 2018

This week I began exploring the Zero Knowledge rabbit hole. Reading, scribbling and scratching my head. I made progress though. Understanding the mysterious cryptography behind a Zero Knowledge proof is going to be a tough nut to crack but I am…

BIL Lab Week 1

October 08, 2018

Exciting, daunting and pretty hectic. I have a lot to learn. My initial goal is to learn Rust, a strongly and statically typed language some people call the new C++. As part of learning Rust I plan to implement the Crypto Pals cryptography…

Blockpass Identity Lab Launch

September 26, 2018

It was a whirlwind of a week, completing a whirlwind month since I left my job at the end of August. A month that has seen me travel to Helsinki for the MyData conference, then on to Berlin for the blockchain week and impressive ETHBerlin hackathon…

The Community Mind

September 20, 2018

My vision, inspired by the book A More Beautiful Question, to open source creativity by inspiring ideas through a connected web of open-ended, thought-provoking questions. Ideas will be the currency of the future. As our technological advancement…

MyData: A Conference, A Community, An Inspiration

September 05, 2018

Wow, what a conference. MyData exceeded my expectations and changed my perspective on a number of issues regarding data. Is it ours? Is it mine? Do I own it and should I? If I own it, should I be able to sell it? The scope of the problem discussed…

Do you exist online?

July 26, 2018

What aspect of your digital life truly belongs to you? What do you use to identify yourself online? Is it yours? What happens to the data you create online? Can you confidently say that you own it? Or that you have a say in how it is used? Currently…

Lessons learned from deploying my first full-stack web application

March 26, 2018

I recently achieved one of my long-term goals: deploying my first full-stack web application. In this post, I’ll be sharing the lessons I learned from a beginner’s perspective, along with some useful tutorials I followed, key roadblocks that I had to…

CodeBlock: A Blockchain Developer Day from Blockchain

March 14, 2018

Eight awesome blockchain presentations across a wide range of topics. One hundred crypto nerds. A perfectly organised event. All made for an inspiring Saturday down at Campus London. First, I would like to say thank you to Blockchain the company for…

Some reflections on my side project’s first anniversary

February 26, 2018

Photo by Joseph Chan on Unsplash My side project turns one this month. It has been a real learning roller coaster. Basically, a side project is something you do on the side — or so I thought. It’s a project that you are self-motivated, rather than…