Self-sovereign identity arrives at Consensus 2018
By: Judd Bagley
Tags: Consensus 2018, Judd Bagley, Blockchain, Identity, Evernym

The annual Consensus conference has emerged as the primary distributed ledger technology-related event of the year and vital for anybody serious about keeping a finger on the pulse of this exciting new world.

A couple of interesting things happened at Consensus 2018, specifically where it concerns the emerging field of self-sovereign identity (SSI) via distributed ledger.

Microsoft’s very well-attended presentation at Consensus 2018 sported the suitably lofty title of Decentralized Identity for a Decentralized World.

First, Microsoft announced significant progress in their effort to put individuals in charge of their own identities (which is the ultimate goal of SSI) by adding support for the Decentralized Identifier (DID) protocol, which was co-authored by Evernym’s own Drummond Reed. DIDs permit the establishment of direct, cryptographically assured, trusting connections between digitally connected entities. These connections remain entirely under the control of, and thus subject to the consent of, the identity owner. Furthermore, DIDs contain no actual identity information, Instead, they unambiguously establish the identity owner’s connection to identity information, which is itself stored elsewhere (and which the DID points to). All this makes the DID protocol a dream for GDPR compliance.

We believe the best implementation of DIDs is the Sovrin distributed ledger, which we invented before giving it to the Hyperledger Foundation as Project Indy. Evernym’s technology uses the Sovrin ledger, which is a global, public utility specialized for use as the internet’s otherwise missing identity layer.

Microsoft sees the benefits of Sovrin the same way we do, and as part of their announcement, indicated they would support DIDs on the Sovrin ledger — apparently in the Microsoft Authenticator mobile app.

Outlier Ventures has a great overview of the announcement here.

The second impressive event for SSI at Consensus 2018 was a very well-attended and exciting demo of the Evernym technology. The demo was sponsored by Hyperledger, as the Evernym technology runs on Sovrin, which is an instance of the Hyperledger Indy codebase.

Evernym Chief Trust Officer Drummond Reed is mobbed by attendees of his demo of the Evernym software at Consensus 2018, which runs on the Sovrin ledger — an instance of the Hyperledger Indy codebase.

As part of the demo, Drummond Reed, myself and software engineer Kyle Den Hartog showed how my smartphone-based digital wallet could be populated with cryptographically signed identity information from an organization like a mobile phone company. That, in and of itself, is interesting, but it became extremely interesting when I was able to then share this identity data with a financial institution in the process of, say, applying for a loan, and that the integrity and accuracy of these identity claims could be verified instantly and with complete confidence by virtue of their having been cryptographically signed by both me and my mobile provider.

Thus, when the bank asks “who are you and who says so?” I can confidently answer the question and tell them not to merely trust me, but to trust my mobile provider. This matters because trusting relationships are vital to efficient interactions, and cryptographically assured DID-mediated connections on the Sovrin ledger add unparalleled confidence to the interactions uniting entities online.

We anticipate SSI delivered via distributed ledger technology will be one of the central themes of Consensus 2019 and expect both Evernym and Sovrin to have plenty to report on.