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Empowering Decentralized Identity Management with Hyperledger Indy

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oodles blockchain

This post assesses how Hyperledger blockchain application development with Indy can solve the identity management problem worldwide.

 

First, let’s explore how current centralized identity management functions, and why there’s a revolutionary shift required.

Centralized Identity Management

Usually, a centralized governing body has control of everything related to our identities. It includes the issuance of website security certificates, the curation of offline and online information, monitoring of access to the world wide web, and more. A centralized model enables authorities to accumulate personal data of users that might be vulnerable to various risks. Storing sensitive information in centralized models and their monitoring by governing officials expose potential data breaches.

No transparency

Identity theft risks

Disparate identities

Cost-draining

While the current identity management systems fail to resolve these problems, self-sovereign identity gives all power to identity owners.

Self-Sovereign Identity

The concept of self-sovereign digital identity provides ownership over personal information to owners, instead of third parties or organizations. It proposes the idea that an identity system should be a decentralized network to make an identity self-sovereign.

Hyperledger Indy is one of the distributed ledger systems to achieve a decentralized identity. Before stepping into the Hyperledger Indy ecosystem for digital self-sovereign identity management, let’s understand identity management in detail.

Decentralized Self-sovereign Identity Management

Assume someone is moving to a new country. It will require to apply for different kinds of services like driving license, energy access, voting, entertainment subscription, and more.

To open an account, they will need to demonstrate their identification by engaging individually with each service provider. They will have to recall for authentication purposes the combination of usernames and passwords or other credentials.

Decentralized identity management with underlying blockchain and cryptography technologies simplifies the entire process.

A decentralized identity environment emphasizes privacy (anonymity) with a login and key management cryptography solution. It not only increases protection and privacy for identity owners but also makes it easier for organizations to authenticate users.

Given that the records contained in a distributed ledger are permanent, hackers or unauthorized entities cannot access, steal, or misuse user personal information.

Any approved entity requires identity owners’ permission to access their Personally Identifiable Information (PII). PII does not reside in the centralized repositories. Each node on the blockchain-based identity network keeps a copy of it on the ledger. It means that there is no risk of a single point of failure. So, a self-sovereign identity based on the decentralized model will protect privacy while ensuring efficiency.

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