Distributed Identity

Full Title or Meme

A means to distribute the sources of Identifiers and Attributes while giving more choice to Users.

Context

• Distributed ID is a particular implementation of Distributed Identity that was still in development in 2018.
• Decentralized ID is a somewhat different concept in that it envisions an identity which is centralized with the user rather than with a central authority.
• The current paradigm in open identity is for each conforming Relying Party to provide a list of Identifier or Attribute Providers that the User could chose from to allow access.
  • In this model it was up to the Relying Party to establish a link and share a secret with the Identifier or Attribute Provider in advance of any transactions.
  • It also required the user to pre-register with one or more of those providers, typically one of the big social sites, like: Google, Microsoft or Facebook.
• Interestingly IBM has offered support for Distributed Identity in their CICS for several generations now. This is similar to the federated identity supported by Microsoft ADFS.
• The current most common protocol for some sort of a Distributed Identity was OpenID Connect which included Self-issued Identity, but that concept never succeeded in the marketplace.
• Now other organizations believe that they can succeed where the OpenID foundation failed.

Problems

• The big problem is Trust where there are no standards or examples of any trust without a history of trusted behavior.
• Beware of time-stamping services posing as trust anchors. Bellcore created such a service in the early 1990 and spun it off into a separate company in 1994. None of these services provide any trust in the contents of the documents.
• Proof of Persistent Identity must be provided. This can be little more than the inclusion of a public key in a blockchain, but that cannot provide any Assurance of protection of the Credential.

Solutions

• The Decentralized Identity Foundation has been created to enable "an open source decentralized identity ecosystem for people, organizations, apps, and devices". The have a list of areas of interest that include block-chain and universal discovery which seem to be diametrically opposite of Privacy legislation like the GDPR and California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018.
• In this wiki the IAP (Identifier or Attribute Provider) supply a Data Category only when that category has User Consent. To get all of those categories that the Relying Party requires, the request needs to go to a User Agent that is able to release the data held across many providers, some of the Thousand Points of Light that apply to the real-world User, but only those appropriate for the Relying Party request are enabled by the user.