It’s always been true that identity is more to do with what other people say about you than what you say about yourself. Placing the user in control of their online identity means that we need the ability to reference authoritative sources of data related to those individuals. If we are to build that user centric and much needed version of Digital Identity then Self-sovereign identity, and its more modest Self-managed form, will need the support of Governments and population scale organisations to provide “trust” that relying parties can understand and consume. Governments will play a vital role in this model as they either hold or facilitate the major sources of “trust” that we use in everyday life. This presentation will explore the building blocks we need to move forward and how standards will play a part in ensuring global frameworks that the public and private sector can rely upon.
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Shared Ledger Technology is increasingly mature, but remains a relatively under-deployed technology in the digital identity space. The emergence of self-sovereign identity approaches, underpinned and powered by shared ledgers, offer new and exciting solutions to establishing digital identities.
As both technologies gain greater mainstream focus, will the combination of the two approaches unlock genuinely consumer-focused identity solution? Moving away from large centrally managed architectures, and giving consumers the power to store, manage and share their personal attributes at a time and manner entirely of their own choosing embodies the new data protection environment post-GDPR and addresses consumer concerns over the power of the big tech companies. It limits the need for centralised processing power and removed honey-pots for hackers. At a technical level the flexibility and immutability of the ledger enables individuals and enterprises to build trusted identities that rely less on formal proofs and easy to forge documents – important in the developed world, but absolutely game changing in the developing world.
The combination of Self-Sovereign and Shared Ledge provides new opportunities and a new vista for digital identity development. Our recent research both identifies the potential of the combined tech, the natural fit with the legislative landscape, and provides a clear view to the factors that will enable wider adoption.
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