Biblio
Authenticating a person's identity has always been a challenge. While attempts are being made by government agencies to address this challenge, the citizens are being exposed to a new age problem of Identity management. The sharing of photocopies of identity cards in order to prove our identity is a common sight. From score-card to Aadhar-card, the details of our identity has reached many unauthorized hands during the years. In India the identity thefts accounts for 77% [1] of the fraud cases, and the threats are trending. Programs like e-Residency by Estonia[2], Bitnation using Ethereum[3] are being devised for an efficient Identity Management. Even the US Home Land Security is funding a research with an objective of “Design information security and privacy concepts on the Blockchain to support identity management capabilities that increase security and productivity while decreasing costs and security risks for the Homeland Security Enterprise (HSE).” [4] This paper will discuss the challenges specific to India around Identity Management, and the possible solution that the Distributed ledger, hashing algorithms and smart contracts can offer. The logic of hashing the personal data, and controlling the distribution of identity using public-private keys with Blockchain technology will be discussed in this paper.
Digital identity is the key element of digital transformation in representing any real-world entity in the digital form. To ensure a successful digital future the requirement for an effective digital identity is paramount, especially as demand increases for digital services. Several Identity Management (IDM) systems are developed to cope with identity effectively, nonetheless, existing IDM systems have some limitations corresponding to identity and its management such as sovereignty, storage and access control, security, privacy and safeguarding, all of which require further improvement. Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) is an emerging IDM system which incorporates several required features to ensure that identity is sovereign, secure, reliable and generic. It is an evolving IDM system, thus it is essential to analyse its various features to determine its effectiveness in coping with the dynamic requirements of identity and its current challenges. This paper proposes numerous governing principles of SSI to analyse any SSI ecosystem and its effectiveness. Later, based on the proposed governing principles of SSI, it performs a comparative analysis of the two most popular SSI ecosystems uPort and Sovrin to present their effectiveness and limitations.
Managing identity across an ever-growing digital services landscape has become one of the most challenging tasks for security experts. Over the years, several Identity Management (IDM) systems were introduced and adopted to tackle with the growing demand of an identity. In this series, a recently emerging IDM system is Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) which offers greater control and access to users regarding their identity. This distinctive feature of the SSI IDM system represents a major development towards the availability of sovereign identity to users. uPort is an emerging open-source identity management system providing sovereign identity to users, organisations, and other entities. As an emerging identity management system, it requires meticulous analysis of its architecture, working, operational services, efficiency, advantages and limitations. Therefore, this paper contributes towards achieving all of these objectives. Firstly, it presents the architecture and working of the uPort identity management system. Secondly, it develops a Decentralized Application (DApp) to demonstrate and evaluate its operational services and efficiency. Finally, based on the developed DApp and experimental analysis, it presents the advantages and limitations of the uPort identity management system.