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Personal control over our online personas has given rise to the philosophy of self-sovereign identity (SSI). In essence, a person who has an SSI has sole ownership of their digital and analog identities and controls how their data is viewed or shared.
Personal control over our online identities and personal data has given rise to the philosophy of self-sovereign identity (SSI). In essence, a person who has an SSI has sole ownership of their digital and analog identities, as well as control over how their personal data is used or shared. While the concept of SSI has existed for decades, it wasn’t until the advent of blockchain that this concept could be translated into a real-world application.
As a growing proportion of our lives moves online, the number of accounts, user profiles, and login credentials the average person needs to manage is continually expanding. As more and more organizations establish their own proprietary system for verifying their users’ identities, end users end up with a multitude of online personas owned by various online organizations. Within this structure, online identities currently suffer from three persistent issues:
Even if you use a password manager for convenience or spend most of your time on multi-service platforms such as Google (which allow you to access multiple services with a single click), you are still delegating control of your online personas to third-party authenticators. The alternative is to personally decide with whom, and how, you choose to share specific aspects of your online persona.
This lack of personal control over our online identities and personal data has given rise to the philosophy of self-sovereign identity (SSI). In essence, a person who has an SSI has sole ownership of their digital and analog identities, as well as control over how their personal data is used or shared. Below we cover the primary components of a self-sovereign identity, and the potential ramifications of this radical new approach to digital identity management.
While the concept of SSI has existed in the abstract for decades, it wasn’t until the advent of blockchain that this theoretical concept could be translated into a working application. Every SSI system must exhibit the following qualities:
There are many approaches to establishing a decentralized ecosystem of self-sovereign identities. They can generally be distilled into a general framework comprised of the following components:
Simply put, a DID is decentralized proof of who you are. And, in contrast to IP addresses, which provide a way for devices to interact with one another, DIDs provide a way for individuals and other device-agnostic entities to communicate. DIDs are on track to become the first new type of online identifier approved by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) since the URL, and an entity can have as many DIDs as necessary, with each DID associated with a specific aspect of a person’s online identity.
As a result, within the context of the SSI framework, your PPI can be interpreted as either “who you are” or “a specific action you claim responsibility for,” depending on the specific context in which it is applied.
The underlying cryptographic process enabling the SSI components to interact can be generalized as such:
It’s important to note that under an SSI system an entity’s verifiable credentials/presentations are not themselves stored on a blockchain ledger. Rather, blockchain technology is used as a transparent, immutable, and secure method to exchange cryptographic keys linked to an entity’s immutable identifying information.
When the internet was initially developed in the 1960s, it was designed to connect devices together in order to share information and resources across multiple networks. However, the internet’s IP protocol is only capable of determining the addresses of the devices you are connecting to and cannot verify the identity of the entity controlling the device.
Self-sovereign identity gives us an autonomous and definitive method of proving who we are and who we are interacting with.
While the precise methodologies for creating an SSI are still in development and have yet to be standardized, the goal is clear: the establishment of a decentralized, interoperable system of online identity management which serves as a codified representation of online user autonomy and individual self-determination. Therefore, SSI embodies the future of digital identity management and is one of the purest expressions of blockchain technology’s latent potential.
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Personal control over our online personas has given rise to the philosophy of self-sovereign identity (SSI). In essence, a person who has an SSI has sole ownership of their digital and analog identities and controls how their data is viewed or shared.
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