What is identity? This is the fact of being who or what a person or thing is.
What is Identity management?
Identity management, also known as identity and access management (IAM) is, in , the and discipline that “enables the right individuals to access the right resources at the right times and for the right reasons”. There are many reasons for which we use identity management. Here are the few basic reasons behind it,
· Improved data security
· Reduced security costs
· More effective access to resources
· Confidentiality of Data
· Performance
· Segregated Tasks
Not only we use identity management in IT fields like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Microsoft, but also the governments maintain identity information centrally. It has become such a crucial component of IT security that, , 92% of businesses plan to increase their IAM investments in the coming years.
How is verifiable yet anonymous?
We all know that is public and maintaining anonymity is a daunting task. Thus, we consider pseudo-anonymous. By pseudo-anonymity, we mean that a person will be linked to a public address, but no one will get to know the actual name or address. To explain this in simple words, suppose a person sends a sum of money, then the receiver will get to know that the sender is linked to a address but will not know the actual address. Hence, we say that or any other alt currencies are not entirely anonymous. There are various reasons for keeping everything hidden, the primary ones include :
· Company-specific information
· Law-enforcement related issues
· Maintaining privacy
To explain this in simple words, I can say that .info in its system keeps on chaining the address for a given . This discourages the ability to trace payments done to a particular . Some of the other platforms like Private Instant Verified Transaction (PIVX) makes use of the mixing mechanism to attain anonymity.
Let’s talk about some identity issues in this world.
Indian government introduced Aadhar to secure its residents’ fundamental rights to have an unforgeable identity. More than 1 billion people have account in Aadhar which is the largest databse in the world. In addition to biometrics, Aadhaar collects name, date of birth, gender, address, mobile/email (optional) of every resident (no need to be a citizen), and stores those centrally against the corresponding finger prints and iris patterns.
But we have seen breaching and sharing of data from Aadhar platform and it leads to privacy issue of an individual which is Fundamental Right for Indian citizen. It is not the concern only for India, in recent past we have seen Facebook also breached the system and used users data.
The user-centric identity paradigm started in 2005. This laid the foundation for user-centric identity paradigm, where the user is in the middle of an identity transaction, between the identity provider and the relying party so that the identity provider will share the user data with the relying party only after the user’s consent. This is one of the primary requirements in the proposed in EU even after 13 years of user centric program.
Why ?
Melanie Swan, in her book, , identifies three generations of .
1.0 is about the currency, the deployment of in applications related to cash.
2.0 is about contracts, the entire slate of economic, market, and financial applications using the that are more extensive than simple cash transactions: stocks, bonds, futures, loans, mortgages, titles, smart property, and smart contracts.
3.0 is about applications beyond currency, finance, and markets — particularly in the areas of government, health, science, literacy, culture, and art.
Let’s discuss below the key use cases solved using , in the identity domain.
1)Namecoin:
Namecoin is a and was the first coin to fork . Similar to registering a .com or .io domain name, you register a .bit domain on the network. This domain is censorship-resistant and impervious to activity tracking.
How Does Namecoin Work?
Namecoin has two main products: NameID and the Dot-Bit DNS.
NameID:
There’s a common trilemma in naming conventions for a network protocol — Zooko’s triangle. Zooko’s triangle states that participant names in a network can only have two out of the following three properties: decentralized, human-meaningful, secure. is a great example in which public addresses are decentralized and secure but nowhere near human-meaningful.
Namecoin solves this trilemma. As a fork, it includes the security and decentralization of while providing an additional layer to allow human-readable names on the network.
NameID combines the identities (i.e., names) on Namecoin with OpenID, an authentication protocol. Using NameID, you can log into any OpenID-enabled website with your Namecoin identity. It’s ’s more secure, less invasive version of “Login with Facebook.”
Dot-Bit DNS:
Stealing the example from the Dot-Bit website, you can think of the Dot-Bit DNS as a decentralized, Internet phone book. Central authorities control a traditional phone book (DNS) giving them the ability to shut down phone numbers (websites) as they see fit. Remember the great SOPA controversy?
Dot-Bit takes the phone book (DNS) and distributes it to all the participants on the network. That way, no single entity can control a phone number (website) unless they own it.
Dot-Bit has some serious advantages over standard DNS systems. The main advantage being its censorship-resistance. We know we’ve mentioned it before, but its importance can’t be overstated — its ’s most valuable attribute.
2) Zooko’s Triangle
Zooko’s Triangle argues that when it comes to securing names in a global namespace one has three choices, only two of which can be realized in a single system. Those choices are:
- Memorable: this means that a human being has a chance of remembering the name. Memorable names pass the “moving bus test” — if you see the name on the side of a bus as it drives past you, you should be able to remember the name long enough to use it when you get home
- Global: this means the name is publicly available, and indeed the entity to whom the name is attached is eager to give it to you. A key goal of marketing and advertising is to capture memorable names in such a fashion that the memorable name is globally locked to a particular entity
- Securely Unique: This is means that the name cannot be forged or mimicked. A name can be forged if one can manufacture an exact duplicate of the name such that neither man nor machine can tell the difference. A name can be mimicked if one can make a name similar enough to fool the human being. In general, phishing depends on mimicry, not forgery.
For example, your GMail username is unique, memorable, but centrally owned by Google — not decentralized. A public key that you generate is globally unique, decentralized (you do not need to deal with any central authority to generate your own public key), but not memorable. A nick name that you pick is decentralized, memorable but not unique.
3) Reputation on the Blockchain
The necessity of reputation systems built in or on top of protocols ensures that peer-to-peer human and machine ecosystems alike can sustainably survive strategic bad actors waiting every patiently for the mainstream of crypto-platforms.
entrepreneurs will quickly determine, via the destruction of early platforms at the hands of bad actors, how important reputational guidelines are within their networks guidelines that go beyond the simplistic “average score” method and attend to the following issues:
· Collusion-Shilling Attack, where malicious nodes submit dishonest feedback and collude with each other to boost their own ratings or bad-mouth non-malicious nodes
· Reputation Cashing-Agents cashing in on their good reputation to carry fraudulent transactions with higher gain
· Strategic Deception-Establishing initial trust for new agents more dynamically (using reputation on other networks, feedback from agents that they have transacted with)
· Faking Identity-Agents faking identities within social impact networks to steal disbursed, charitable resources.
We also have other use cases like ShoCard , Blockstack,uPort,Civic , Mooti . So We went through the innovation happened in the domain of identity, with respect to the adaptation of technologies, and discussed the impact of it to the rest of the world.
Published at Thu, 28 Mar 2019 13:00:16 +0000
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