Self-Sovereign Identity- A Use-Case of Blockchain Technology
By: Kushagra Srivastava
Tags: Crypto, Smart Contracts, Blockchain, Ethereum, Identity Management

We have been listening around for a while that Blockchain is going to be the next-big-thing and that this technology will disrupt the ways in which the organizations are working at present. Well, I guess at present I am not qualified enough to mark any statement regarding this, but through this article, I will surely try to give you an idea about how actually blockchain technology can be used for a better and more secure future.

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In this article, I will be discussing a use case of blockchain in the field of Identity Management Systems. So let’s get started.

What is Identity ??

I guess it’s about communicating who you are. Proving your personal information is very important in every interaction you have with companies, Government, social groups, and more. Your identity is the center of every transaction you make.

A very prominent question that arises is “ Who owns my identity? “

Is it me who has all the right or is it the Government who issues the basic documents or the Service Providers who issue the authentication factors based on the basic documents.

In the wake of high profile security breaches that we witnessed with Equifax at the United States, Aadhar in India, or even Facebook worldwide, we can withstand that we are on the cusp of something really critical happening here and all this touches the right of privacy.

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Unique Id that we get merely proves that we are a unique individual and whether you are a citizen or not becomes a separate matter just like you are member to Facebook is a separate matter to your inherent identity.

Moreover, the degree to which an individual needs to share his identity for a particular purpose is also not in the control of the person. Take for instance, in order to prove that you are 18+ in age, how does it make sense to provide an identity which has details more than just your birth-year.

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With the problem issued we can feel the need for an efficient Identity Management System. It is important to come up with a new paradigm that will be more human-centric and will allow us to have more control over their personal identifiable data and be able to give access to his or her data at their own will.

Here comes the idea of Self-Sovereign Identity.

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To understand what is self-sovereign identity let me walk you through an example.

Assume you have a locker-box with a key. The information that gets collected inside the locker-box and the information that gets extracted from the locker-box completely depends on your will and is fully under your control. Say your locker box contains information such as your name, your date of birth, your citizenship, your receipt from orders on Amazon, or any such thing which discloses something relevant about your identity.

This Self-Sovereign identity is

More diverse which means that for a single person there are multiple identities or personas.

More granular that is the identity of a person is more attribute-based.

More probabilistic which means that any identity or attribute provided by the person is bagged by some proof.

There is a clear link between self-sovereign identity and a distributed ledger technology such as blockchain.

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To see how this works, consider an example of presenting your driver’s license to the bar.

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The license is issued by DMV to you, who is the claim holder. This is a digital representation of your driver’s license. The DMV uses keys linked to their decentralized identifier on the blockchain to sign the claim so that it is tamper-evident and anyone who gets it can validate that it was issued by the DMV. You have a wallet to hold your claims and can use keys linked to a decentralized identifier that you control on the blockchain to countersign the digital driver’s license. When the bar needs to see that you’re of legal age, you can present the digital driver’s license and the bar can verify that it hasn’t been changed, that the DMV issued it to you, and you’re the one presenting it. Everyone can use the blockchain to lookup decentralized identifiers and retrieve any associated public keys.

To get a bit deeper with the technicalities the smart contracts act as unique identifiers that’s tied to cryptographic keys. These keys can be then used for authentication or to sign documents, claims, or blockchain transactions. Therefore, only things that remain visible publicly on the blockchain is public keys.

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The article is based completely on my research and understanding and I have tried to ensure that the information provided is technically sound as far as possible. This being said, I am always open to your stands and opinion on the topic. We can have a chat over the topic and who knows if are frequency matches, we might turn out to be the next tech-savvy duo like Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Well, JUST KIDDING.

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I hope you have a good time reading this.

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