The immutable and time stamped state proofs Hippolyta creates can be used to anchor state proofs of Theseus provenance logs that prove ownership of intellectual property. The time stamping data stores—such as public blockchains—serve as the means for ordering who has claim to intellectual property first and is therefore the owner. Hippolyta serves a critical role in making authenticated provenance into something that is verifiable by anybody, anywhere.
The Hippolyta API accumulates an unlimited number of state proofs into a fixed sized cryptographic accumulator that gets stored in the underlying storage, be it a blockchain or any other time stamping database. The cryptographic accumulators themselves are considered a one-way function that do not reveal any of the original data associated with the state it stores. This forms a cryptographically secure, privacy abstraction and allows the accumulators to be published publicly.
Their fixed sized also allows Hippolyta to record any number of state proofs in any/all of the underlying blockchains and databases it supports. This makes it the obvious choice for anchoring state proofs for all data on the internet while avoiding putting all of our eggs into a single blockchain basket.
One interesting use case for Hippolyta is to anchor state proofs for a data set as it is modified over time so that future analysis and data forensics can correctly order data snapshots chronologically. This adds another layer of security for efforts to create "explainable AI" by timestamping and recording state proofs of the AI's internal state as it is being trained. This allows future investigations to pinpoint the inputs that lead the AI's training down the path being investigated.
Another application is to provide transparency to the process of statistical analysis of a data set as it is transformed in ways to eliminate noise and to gain deeper insights. The non-repudiable transaparency provides a defense against claims of data manipulation to achieve a specific end result. Hippolyta makes it easy to conduct contentious scientific research in a provable, undeniable and transparent way.
The Hippolyta API abstracts away the underlying state proof storage mechanism and supports many different blockchains—both public and private. Hippolyta is designed to be the simplest way to store state proofs in multiple blockchains and to link them together cryptographically.
Integrating the Hippolyta API requires just a few lines of code and our SDK is written in Rust by usable directly in PHP, Python, Nodejs, and others. Typically, integration can be done in less than a day.
Hippolyta is designed to be a simple API that abstracts away the details of storing state proofs in blockchains and databases. The only requirement is that the blockchain or database must be able to store at least 80 bytes of arbitrary state data. This makes Hippolyta compatible with Bitcoin as well as many other public blockchains. It also provides support for using SQL databases as well as LDAP servers for integration into more traditional enterprise security solutions. The only requirement there is that the anchor records must be timestamped and write access to the anchors must be disabled or strictly limited and controlled.
Self-sovereign identity is limited in its scalability and privacy preservation capabilities. Oberon supports a flexible claims framework for constructing complex zero-knowledge proofs. It also supports fully redactible signatures and private set intersection to eliminate leaking privacy sensitive data while supporting arbitrarily complex proofs and capability combinations.
Self-sovereign identity solution providers like to talk about "anoncreds". You can think of Oberon as being "anoncreds 2.0" because it fixes all of the problems and limitations in the current solutions and actually preserves the privacy of the clients while reducing the security risks to the server.
