Difference between revisions of "Distributed Identity"

Revision as of 09:55, 31 July 2018

Full Title or Meme

A means to distribute the sources of identity and give more choice to Users.

Context

• The current paradigm in open identity is for each conforming Relying Party to provide a list Identifier or Attribute Providers that the use 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.
• The current most common protocol for this version of a Distributed Identity was OpenID Connect which also enabled 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.^[1]

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^[2] 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.

References

1. ↑ BELLCORE SPINS OFF NEW COMPANY TO OFFER DIGITAL NOTARY (TM)(SM) SERVICE http://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Mar/100
2. ↑ Decentralized Identity Foundation working groups http://identity.foundation/working-groups