Secure, digital identity and credential management

Your digital identity is your most valuable asset.

From the early days of the internet, we have been signing up for services, sharing our email, our names, passwords, date of birth, address, our relationships, even what we eat. Each time, a little part of our identity is stored with a third party, enabling them to provide recommendations, ease-of-use and personalisation. We trade in these details for convenience in an ever increasingly busy lifestyle.

While we can edit this data, we no longer own it, a right given up during registration to help companies better monetise and provide services. Interestingly, we are less concerned with our identity than we used to be, most would be concerned if a restaurant asked them for their home address and date of birth before seating them at a table, but signing up for a new service? Sure, ok.

This worrying trend not only has real-world consequences, but the continued mass centralisation of this data with third-parties has opened consumers up to significant risk.

Why does this matter?

2017 has been littered with security breaches affecting personal information. From Equifax to the US SEC and most recently Yahoo revising their 2013 breach notice to encompass all 3+ billion user accounts they held. Worryingly consumers have become bizarrely comfortable with giving away their personal information in a trade for convenience.

These data breaches are concerning for two reasons:

1. The direct impact they have on consumers can be significant, from someone logging into other services with your credentials to signing up for new credit cards or loans.

2. The continued warehousing and collection of this data further increases the economic incentives of breaching a single provider to get access to so many records at once.

Taking back your digital identity

One of the most promising applications of blockchain technology is self-sovereign identities. The ability to take back control of your identity, and control how and when that information is shared with third parties.

At Aversafe we believe that self-sovereignty is just the first step in delivering global-scale credential and identity management services. Through our easy to use applications, you will be able to establish your digital identity, load in certifications, work history, achievements, personal information and securely have this verified and shared with third parties, at your discretion.

The key here is control, all data and all control moves back to the consumer. Aversafe does not have access to your identity information, nor do we store it, you do. Economic incentives for breaching individual devices to get a single identity significantly challenges would-be attackers while changing the economics of identity theft in favour of consumers.

Credential management

The identity management problem space is massive, affecting every single person connected to the internet, and just as importantly, anyone coming online for the first time. It is early days for self-sovereign identities and Aversafe while at the forefront of this movement is focused on real-world applications that have large social, economic and individual impacts on consumers.

We chose credential management as the first place to deploy self-sovereignty because it impacts more than 3.4 billion employees globally, as well as every company and certificate institution on the planet. An ambitious but achievable goal and one that builds the foundation for significantly larger applications.

The future

We believe that self-sovereign identity is just the beginning, step 0 towards solving significant social and economic problems affecting the globe and we are not alone, Microsoft, uPort, the Decentralized Identity Foundation, the World Bank and United Nations are all looking at ways to address identity management on the blockchain.

From smoother cross-border travel to banking applications, logging into services or accessing data overseas, self-sovereignty is the first step towards a decentralised, individual-focused identity solution.

Why now?

There is no better time to take back your identity than today.

We will be publishing further posts this week on the specific credential management problem we are targeting first and the solution to that problem. Stay tuned!