ION: a decentralized identification system that Microsoft is preparing

ION-logo

After more than a year of development, Microsoft presented the results of its development of a platform for a decentralized identification system (DID).

The project Microsoft Identity Overlay Network (ION) is a layer 2 open source network running on the bitcoin blockchain, an approach that the company believes which will dramatically improve the performance of a DID system to achieve tens of thousands of operations per second.

How to Live Aligned with Alex Simons explains, Vice President of Program Management, Identity Division, Microsoft:

“We believe that each person needs a decentralized digital identity that they own and control, backed up by their own identifiers that allow secure and confidential interactions.

This self-identity must be seamlessly integrated into your lives and placed at the center of everything you do in the digital world.

“We have worked hard to contribute to many emerging standards and develop open source components to realize this vision, with Identity Hubs as our latest contribution.

Identity centers provide secure and encrypted storage of personal data and rely on decentralized systems (blockchain and distributed ledger) to anchor your credentials. Unfortunately, these systems do not have the performance characteristics required to power a truly decentralized identity system on a global scale.

The implications of the new identification network they could include removing passwords. A company could check a new employee's background and hire them with a single virtual click, or a bank customer could verify their identity for a loan without revealing information. Personally identifiable, again at the click of a button.

ION a proposal that the information is only controlled by the user

A blockchain-based identification system is based on a digital wallet which serves as a repository for all kinds of personal and financial data, insights that can only be shared after a specific request and only with the owner's permission as it contains the public key (in a typical Bitcoin network, digital wallets).

According to Homan Farahmand, senior director of research at Gartner, many vendors in the DID space are in the early stages of research and development or are testing their products as part of pilot projects.

In fact, one of the inherent problems with Bitcoin is its low transactional performance and its inability to evolve due to computer overload, as each node (computer) in a Bitcoin network receives a copy of the registry in near real time and a consensus mechanism requires nodes to verify the authenticity of new entries when resolving a complex mathematical problem.

blockchain

When using the Sidetree protocol (a Layer 2 network) to offload storage and overhead processing to an adjacent network, lThe main blockchain is free of requirements.

On Microsoft's Bitcoin platform, only a user's hash ID is linked in the chain of blocks, while the actual identity data is encrypted and stored in an out-of-channel hub ID that Microsoft cannot see.

Like other decentralized identity design models, ION establishes decentralized storage for identity metadata, in this case, using the interplanetary file system (IPFS, a peer-to-peer protocol for distributing addressable content over hypermedia).

A trust anchor mechanism (Bitcoin blockchain), as well as a decentralized public key management protocol that is the Sidetree Protocol, according to Farahmand.

Bitcoin is not the only way to explore Layer 2 technology to improve performance. Ethereum, another of the blockchain platforms most popular in the world, has also been a candidate.

Other networks decentralized identity They include the recently launched Sovrin network and SecureKey Verified.Me in Canada.

Because it is based on Bitcoin, Microsoft's ION will be a public, permissionless network that anyone can use to create DIDs and manage their PKI (Public Key Infrastructure), explained Daniel Buchner.

Unlike a licensed blockchain, more generally for business use cases, no one manages a public blockchain. Network users verify newly entered data blocks according to a consensus mechanism.


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