PurposeRecognizing, tracking and providing mechanisms for sharing an individual's comprehensive record of learning is necessary and essential for both her agency over and ability to manage sharing ...her qualifications with parties whom she desires to be aware of her learning record. In doing so, she may capture and present degrees, certifications, microcredentials or badges representing varying levels of knowledge, skill and abilities (KSAs) achieved in both formal and informal educational experiences. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned ideas.Design/methodology/approachIn the USA, competency frameworks are gaining more solid footing with both higher education institutions and employers as both move to address the changing landscape of education-to-work preparation and the relationships that exist between them. The need to support lifelong learning and the various pathways that individuals traverse in and out of educational pursuits and the workforce require a more personalized approach.FindingsThis paper will discuss the drivers of the newfound traction of competency frameworks among higher education and employers within the USA, present examples of the frameworks and how they are being applied to address the common interests of educators, employers and the learner/earners, and explain the role badges and microcredentials play in capturing and recognizing the broad spectrum of learning, skills and competencies achieved by an individual throughout the lifelong learning journey.Originality/valueThe digital badging taxonomy and concept of using badges as a representation of a unit of competency, both introduced in this paper, provide a unique strategy for contextualizing the relationship between levels of cognitive domain recognized in academic settings and the language of KSAs used by employers.
How to achieve secure content distribution and accountability in information-centric networking (ICN) is a crucial problem. Subscribers need to verify whether the data came from a reliable source, ...rather than from a spoofing adversary. Public key cryptography was introduced to achieve a method of authentication that binds the data packet to its owner. In existing prototypes, PKIs, identity-based signatures (IBSs) and recommendation networks are the common schemes used to ensure the authenticity and availability of public keys. However, CA-based PKIs and KGC-based IBSs have been proven to be weak when it comes to resisting security attacks, with recommendation networks being too complex to deploy. In this respect, we designed a novel distributed authentication model as a secure scheme to support public key cryptography. Our model establishes a decentralized public key infrastructure by combining the smart contracts of blockchain and optimized zero-knowledge proof-verifiable presentations by utilizing the DID project, which realizes the management of public key certificates through blockchain and ensures the authenticity and availability of public keys in decentralized infrastructure. Our scheme fundamentally solves the issues of security and feasibility in existing schemes and provides a more scalable solution with respect to authenticating data sources. An experiment demonstrated that our proposal is 20% faster than the original zero knowledge proof scheme in registration.
Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) is relatively new and has yet to stand the test of time. Therefore, one of the challenges of the transition to PQC is to design protocols that can withstand this ...revolution without losing the level of security provided by the use of traditional quantum-vulnerable algorithms. Among the vast number of protocols and frameworks that require transition, the digital identity is one of the most important, especially in the case of Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) is a decentralized model to build and to prove the identity with full control over the data. This paper presents for the first time the design of a Post-Quantum/Traditional (PQ/T) hybrid SSI framework. The enabling component of the hybrid framework is the novel design of PQ/T hybrid verifiable credential and presentation, featuring a PQ/T combined proof with backward compatibility. The paper concludes with a complete design and a performance estimation on a well-resourced IoT node.
