CIO’s guideline on Blockchain Digital Identity management

Understanding the Blockchain Digital Identity management system will help CIOs come closer to a seamless solution that generates trust and privacy.

The rise of the Blockchain Digital Identity management model

McKinsey highlighted in one of their research: “In the emerging economies we examine, we find that basic digital ID alone could unlock 50 to 70 percent of the full economic potential, assuming adoption rates of about 70 percent.” Blockchain is redefining the definition of digital identity, making it more usable.

Explore the guideline for CIOs in Blockchain Digital Identity management to understand the potential of blockchain in digital identity management and the system’s components.

The rise of the Blockchain Digital Identity management model

The history of digital identity management models begins with silos, where each organization issues a digital identity on its system to a user to enable this person to access its services. A person can have many different digital identities when operating on many separate organizations.

However, this model leads to ineffective management and negative experience when users have to remember too many accounts of different services. Therefore, third parties like Facebook or Google started providing digital credentials services, allowing users to use their Facebook or Google accounts to log in to other services and websites.

This model is more convenient for users when they only register one identity for many different services. Most of the current websites and services offer this feature. Nevertheless, it also contains privacy and privacy concerns, which has been proved in data breaches by third-parties lately. Facebook, Instagram, Marriott, P&N Bank are some of the names in the long list of data scandals.

Recently, the rise of blockchain technology has brought a new model of identity management, where individuals can self-protect their data. Indeed, blockchain ensures individuals can access a variety of services with a single digital identity and solves the problem of data security and privacy at the same time.

Entities and personal data on Blockchain Digital Identity management system

Blockchain is an immutable ledger technology that uses encryption algorithms, hash functions, and consensus mechanisms to store data securely. However, in terms of developing the existing systems, we need to cover more in entities and specific data used in the Blockchain Digital Identity management system to maintain data sovereignty.

Whereby, there are three entities in the Blockchain Digital Identity management system: Owners, Issuers, and Verifiers.

Owners: The identity owners – The users, who own personal credentials (name, address, passport number, behaviors when using the services)
Issuers: A trusted party such as local government, can issue and attest personal credentials for the identity owners, so-called credentials.
Verifiers: The service providers or website owners. Instead of checking real personal data (e.g. date of birth, passport number), the verifiers will review the issuers’ credentials of that information.

Hence, the truth is that the data stored on the blockchain will not be actual personal data but the evidence to prove data’s accuracy, including (but may not be limited to):

Users’ Decentralized Identity (DID):

DID is a unique identifier to represent an individual permanently. The identity owner has complete control over his/her DID, without being regulated by existing centralized registrars, authorities, and identity providers. DID also uses cryptographic keys to testify to the validity of the credential-associated signature of the issuing authority.

Definitions for Credentials:

Definitions for Credentials are to use for authentication. They can exist in the form of QR codes. When you want to certify that you qualify for a service, you only need to provide this code to the verifiers. Verifiers scan this code to identify the authenticated evidence.

Proofs of sharing data consent:

Proofs of sharing data consent represent consent for the person to be allowed to do so, i.e. information has been received and checked.

Above are the necessary components of a blockchain digital identity management system relating to entities and personal data that every CIO should keep in mind.

As an enterprise blockchain platform built on Hyperledger to run on any cloud, akaChain is developing multiple applications with digital identity blockchain. Our digital identity blockchain applications are focused on solving the major modern enterprise challenge: Find a way to exploit the business value of data while ensuring data security and privacy with a reasonable implementation fee.

To learn more about blockchain digital identity and related applications, you can explore at blog.akachain.io or leave contact information, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

About akaChain

akaChain is backed by FPT Software, a globally leading technology, and IT services provider. It is an end-to-end, permissioned, multi-chain network based on the Hyperledger Fabric. Since Establishment in September 2018, akaChain’s product has assisted many enterprises, from SMEs to Fortune 500 firms, to transform with distributed ledger technology. The company provides a broad range of permissioned blockchain-based products and services in multiple sectors, including retail, supply chain, banking and finance, insurance, shopping mall management, etc. to transform with its distributed ledger technology. For more information, please visit https://blog.akachain.io/.