Ion ID

Full Title or Meme

One brand of Decentralized ID (DID) originated by Microsoft.

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.

• Decentralized ID (DID) is a somewhat different concept in that it envisions an Identifier which is crated by the user, and could serve as a basis for a Distributed ID, but does not address the relationship to other Identifiers.
• 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 Identifier, but that feature of OpenID Connect had not been deployed in 2018.

Problems

• The big problem is Trust where there are no standards or examples of any trust without a history of trusted behavior.
• Proof of Persistent Identity must be provided. This can be little more than the inclusion of a public key in a block chain, but that cannot provide any Assurance of protection of the Credential.

Solutions

• A test registration for an Ion ID is [https://didproject.azurewebsites.net/docs/registration.html here}.

References

1. Decentralized Digital Identities and Blockchain perspective from Microsoft