Block 15 IKP Sessions: Proposed Agenda

Working Group(s) IAM, Key Management & Privacy (IKP)
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Block 15: 15 to 16 October 2026, Washington, DC.

Posting the proposed IKP working group session agenda for Block 15. Six IKP sessions and two cross-working-group collaborations. Descriptions below reflect the current shape of each; all of them will sharpen as speakers confirm.

Proposed sessions

1. PQC: resource estimates and the ECDSA.fail community Reflection on the community resource-estimation effort: gate cost models, what the benchmark challenge revealed, and what the numbers mean for migration timelines on Ethereum, Bitcoin, and other chains. The Ethereum and Eigen Labs contributors are writing a paper reflecting on the agentic auto-research challenge, and this session is where that emerging community and the academic quantum cryptography field meet. The resource-estimation practitioners are producing numbers the academics can interrogate; the academics hold the measurement rigour the practitioners need. BGIN is the neutral venue with both in the room.

2. PQC: crypto agility and the NIST signature migration Crypto agility as a governance property, the NIST PQC signature migration path, and the competitive landscape across Ethereum, Bitcoin, and blockchain ecosystems generally. Held with NIST participation. Together with session 1, this sits at the midpoint of the wider PQC programme arc: after the GDC policy-alignment work in Geneva, before competition guidelines are drafted and published. October is where the evaluation framing gets pressure-tested in public. In all programme materials BGIN remains the neutral, multi-stakeholder evaluation forum; it does not select algorithms and does not run the competition.

3. ZKP and private biometric authentication World Foundation’s biometric ZKP work and the Linux Foundation ZKP working group’s biometric authentication track, brought into one session: what each proof actually proves, where the biometric lives, and what revocation means for a credential bound to something you cannot rotate. A public IKP WG session runs before September as the preparatory step; see the dedicated research pathway post.

4. Proof of personhood: personhood credentials in AI Continuation of the IKP proof of personhood paper track, now focused on personhood credentials as agentic AI raises the cost of not knowing whether a counterparty is human. Deliberately adjacent to, not merged with, session 3; the two converge explicitly in the room.

5. Wallet governance and offline key management Governance models for wallets, custody boundaries, and the offline key management practices that survive both compromise and succession.

6. Transaction monitoring and blockchain forensics Case studies from the field and from providers. Practitioner-led.

Collaboration sessions

  • AI (with FASE): AI research and privacy.
  • Cyber: information sharing framework for AI agents.

Notes

Session champions and speaker suggestions are welcome in this thread, If the schedule forces consolidation, sessions 5 and 6 are the likeliest candidates for merging or rotation.

The PQC programme roadmap and its governance questions live in the Steering Committee thread; this post is the session agenda only.

@nat @shinichiro.matsuo

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IKP Research Pathway: ZKP and Private Biometric Authentication

This post opens an IKP WG research pathway on zero-knowledge proofs applied to biometric authentication, and announces a public working group session to be held between now and September 2026 as the on-ramp to a full session at Block 15.

Why this pathway, why now

Biometric authentication is being deployed at population scale, and the governance question has sharpened: can a system verify that a person is who they claim to be, or that a person is a unique human at all, without that system holding, seeing, or being able to reconstruct the biometric itself?

Zero-knowledge proofs are the most credible answer on the table, and two significant bodies of work have matured in parallel:

  1. World Foundation’s biometric ZKP work, including a demonstrable implementation of ZK verification over iris-derived data, deployed against real uniqueness-at-scale requirements.
  2. The Linux Foundation ZKP working group’s biometric authentication track, developing the open, implementation-neutral treatment of the same problem space.

These two efforts have overlapping problem statements and largely non-overlapping rooms. An IKP WG session putting them side by side is a cheap, high-value convening: BGIN does not need to endorse either approach to be the venue where they are examined together.

The public session (before September)

Format: open IKP working group call, 90 minutes.

Proposed agenda:

  1. World Foundation: biometric ZKP demo and architecture walkthrough (25 min)
  2. Linux Foundation ZKP WG: biometric work, scope and current drafts (25 min)
  3. Moderated comparison: threat models, trust assumptions, revocation, template protection, what each proof actually proves (25 min)
  4. Open discussion and Block 15 scoping (15 min)

Timing: targeting late July or August, ahead of GDC (1 to 3 September, Geneva) so that findings can inform any relevant Geneva conversations, and well ahead of Block 15 (15 to 16 October, Washington, DC), where this pathway gets a dedicated session.

Research questions for the pathway

These are the questions I propose the pathway carry through the public session, Block 15, and any resulting deliverable:

  1. What is being proven? In each system, what statement does the ZKP actually attest: uniqueness, liveness, template match, enrolment integrity, or some composition? Where does the trust boundary sit relative to the proof?
  2. Where does the biometric live? Device, custodial enclave, distributed storage, or nowhere (derived and discarded)? What are the reconstruction risks in each posture?
  3. Revocation and compromise. Biometrics cannot be rotated. What does revocation mean for a biometric-bound credential, and how do the two approaches handle template or key compromise?
  4. Proof of personhood adjacency. How do these systems relate to personhood credentials in agentic AI contexts (see the parallel IKP proof of personhood track)? Is biometric ZKP a personhood primitive, an authentication primitive, or both, and does conflating the two create governance risk?
  5. Standards surface. Which elements are ready for standardisation, and in which venue: ISO, W3C, IETF, the LF ZKP WG itself?
  6. Regulatory posture. How do these architectures map against biometric data protection regimes (GDPR special category data, state biometric statutes, emerging digital identity frameworks)?

Relationship to other IKP work

This pathway sits alongside, and deliberately does not merge with, the proof of personhood paper track. Biometric ZKP is one candidate mechanism for personhood credentials, but the pathway examines it first as an authentication and key management question, which is the IKP remit. Where the two tracks converge, they will do so explicitly at Block 15.

Asks

  1. Speakers: confirmed contacts at World Foundation and the LF ZKP WG willing to present at the public session; if you hold those relationships, reply here or reach out directly.
  2. A co-moderator for the comparison segment, ideally someone with applied biometrics or template-protection background.
  3. Date preferences: indicate late July vs. August availability in this thread.
  4. Additional research questions to add to the list above before it hardens into the session brief.
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Do you have a link to check the status?
I suggest that we try to invite one or 2 speakers from Ethereum community on those topics.

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Agreed, I’m hoping these experts emerge at Gdc and via the world Id connection. I’ll discuss with LF zkp wg chair in the next week see this direction and let you know