Digital Identity: DNIe

Domain: Digital Identity

Problem identification: 

Decentralized identity is how individuals control when, where and with whom they share their credentials. In the physical world, we take this sharing of credentials for granted – yet a secure, smart way to do this has been long missing in the digital world.

Why Blockchain:

  • Trust – In blockchain-based systems, the metadata used for communications is maintained in the distributed ledger. The authenticity of the data is verified through multiple nodes, through a consensus mechanism. This decentralization is useful in the context of Digital Identities, especially when National Identifiers are used across multiple agencies. 
  • Security – Blockchain technology has been designed to maintain data in an encrypted and immutable manner, and secured through cryptography, thereby, keeping the ID protected and traceable. Moreover, blockchain based systems removes the vulnerability associated with password protection.
  • Integrity – The advantage of this kind of identity system over traditional ones is the ability to maintain each identity across all the nodes in the network. Though the data is distributed across peer-to-peer networks, it is continuously reconciled and kept up to date. Also, the blockchain network does not have a single point of failure, making it difficult for hackers to break the integrity of the data set. 
  • Simplicity – A blockchain framework simplifies the process for each stakeholder involved: Identity issuance, Identity verifiers, Identity Owners.
  • Privacy – Regulators across the world are clamoring for privacy of citizen’s personal and sensitive information. 

Decentralized identity is promising and is attracting significant attention and focus in two points: Ecosystem and new infrastructure Many benefits will accrue only when a large ecosystem of entities adopt decentralized identity solutions, issue and verify credentials digitally, and institute standards to enable interoperability and portability.

Functional Description

The project’s domain is an implementation of ERC 725 and ERC 735, proposed standard for managing Digital Identity on the Blockchain. The project uses the Truffle framework and Ganache CLI for testing. Ganache CLI, part of the Truffle suite of Ethereum development tools, is the command line version of Ganache, a personal blockchain for Ethereum development. Sweet tools for smart contracts. The Truffle Suite gets developers from idea to dapp as comfortably as possible. 

Using ERC 725, a Smart Contract can protect function calls from being executed unless the Sender has a verified Claim from a trusted Issuer, e.g. build a mechanism into our Smart Contracts to only allow interactions from reputable people. ERC-725 allows for many more use-cases, such as multi-sig execution approvals and verification by contract call instead of key validation.

Technology used