Difference between revisions of "Distributed ID"

Revision as of 10:17, 18 September 2018

Full Title or Meme

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

Context

Every one knows the problem with identities on the internet. They are not under the control of users, who are extremely interested in their own Identity and want their own Privacy.

• Distributed ID is a somewhat different concept in that it envisions an identity which is broken into may pieces that are hosted by many different authorities and only brought together in a Relying Party upon User Consent.
• 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.
• 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.^[1] 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^[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.
• 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.
• The Hundred Points of Light serve as a metaphor for the Distributed ID.

Self-sovereign identities seem to be the answer to all parties' concerns. ^[3] The only problem with it that I can see is that no one seems to know exactly what it is or how it might work. MIT has started an open source effort to build something^[4] but no one seems to know what.

References

1. Decentralized Digital Identities and Blockchain perspective from Microsoft
2. ↑ BELLCORE SPINS OFF NEW COMPANY TO OFFER DIGITAL NOTARY (TM)(SM) SERVICE http://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Mar/100
3. ↑ Decentralized Identity Foundation working groups http://identity.foundation/working-groups
4. ↑ Ian Glazer, Why self-sovereign identity will get adopted (and it’s not the reason you probably want) 2018-06-15 https://www.tuesdaynight.org/2018/06/15/why-self-sovereign-identity-will-get-adopted-and-its-not-the-reason-you-probably-want/
5. ↑ Github, Developing General Principles for Sovereign Identity. https://github.com/mitmedialab/SovereignIdentityPrinciples