Breaking Down Data Silos with Self-Sovereign Identity

Transcript

alright ok thanks for coming I'm gonna speak briefly about south sovereign identity and breaking the identities silos just quick introduction my name is Marnie I'm Roxy an engineer at Rabobank Netherlands were about the second largest bank in the Netherlands and one of the industry leaders on food and agriculture we have a dedicated blockchain team and we do a lot of research in in blockchain and all these kinds of topics in which in our previous experiments and proof of concepts we were constantly looking for a an

identity component to to bring that solution forward and so we we just decided to spend some more time on self sovereign identity a lot more time actually we started four years ago and so we built a lot of knowledge on its on this field and we we saw that there's a lot of problems in the internet we don't have a unique or a general identity layer in the internet and that leads to having you your account registered at these various parties everywhere so there's we need some solutions and we also want to give the user back to

control of their over their own data so that's why we're going to focus on self sovereign identity because when having your own data stored on your own phone or on your own mobile device you are to help yourself and that means that all of these parties can use your data whenever they whenever you give consent and whenever they need it so just a another example on self sovereign identity right now we have these physical cards you know your passport your your ID card something to go shopping these physical go-karts are your own property you have

them yourselves and you can decide whether you can give them to to the party state they need it so you are in full control of your physical passes and we don't really have a physical or sorry we don't really have a digital equivalent to these physical cards and that's exactly what we're need because organizations don't want to store more personal identifiable information than they need and after a certain amount of time they will need to delete your data as well so you will yeah it will be lost so you you can't be you're not able to to take the data with you and we just we just want to use it to be in full

control and you are not able to you are not not able to be dependent on the central party with your with your identity that's very important so when looking on self sovereign identity we took these ten principles in mind when developing our own self sovereign identity protocol which is open source these are the temporal costs ten ten principles made up by Christopher Alan this is the person that actually came up with the idea of self sovereign identity and so one of one of the biggest items of these is for example control that

it's very important for you to be in full control of your own data and also be completely self completely independent also we were focusing on Portability and interoperability that is because we saw a lot of identity self sovereign identity protocols popping up and probably in the future there will not be one protocol that will be used everywhere all around the world so it's very important for wallet developers or for people that receive this kind of data that they will be able to speak in different language

in different protocols so if you look at self sovereign identity and blockchain we have a lot of questions because we also want to not only have your fiscal card on your phone but we also want to fight fraud and so so that's one thing how do we check authenticity and how do we check provenance if it's coming from the right issuer from the right data source also how can I prove that I own this card this digital card and because we're in the in the real time digital world how can we introduce reification

that also work real time so a lot is cryptography and peer-to-peer networking so a lot of data will be sent from your own phone which is your identity wallet to the party that needs your data so a lot will be embedded inside using cryptography so with digital signatures with hashing and so forth and then the last one is for real-time replication so we can use the blockchain for that so blockchain is a very tiny part but it's really important for the data issuer to revoke the data at a later point or actually to make it invalid not to

revoke but to make it invalid so how does this look like in this decentralized world we have issuers holders and verifiers so the issuers are the parties that issue your data so this is the source where your data comes from this can be the government or or a bank or some other institution or it can be can be someone relative to you maybe a family member that's issuing something about you so there should be anyone that's able to issue anything so we we do need some kind of censorship resistance feature there as well alright so and

then we have to hold her holder has the identity wallet and the holder is able to yeah to store all the data that's incoming the last part is the verifier so for instance if I want to book some flights and that that company needs my data my my first name my last name then I will need to send this data to the verifier and for that I will need to give consent first a my identity wallet and it will be sent back to the verifier the blockchain keeps track of every credential that has been issued by the issuer so each credential gets a unique address and with this address you can also prove ownership so this is the high-level

architecture of how we do our proof of concepts and pilots so we have an issuer that's actually yeah just issuing the data that they want and just for convenience we built an identity API which is handling all the cryptography all the digital signing and the blockchain logic so these parties are really easy to integrate and to support self sovereign identity in their own portals because it's just a matter of two or three REST API calls to this identity API and then you're done so we use standards we use w3c verified credentials we've been following this

for quite some time and there's also some open source stuff in which you are able to generate and sign verify the credentials and also generate and sign verifiable presentations using an easy interface for JavaScript developers we also use D IDs we haven't yet supported Universal resolver but we're working on that as well so we want to be able to get identities from different chains as well so this is how your identity wallet will would look like you will have many credentials from many parties all stored on your phone and you have full control of who you share

it with so we are working on for use cases right now which are going to pilot actually the it's not really in order but the courier well that's a third one is actually running right now in pilot phase using this architecture that I just explained really briefly so the career wallet is allows employees for of course employees when they need to work at a bank they need a special certificate WFT certificate and they currently they get this through paper so they need to you know hand it over to their manager and they need to check if

the paper is correct so we want to digitalize this and we are working with an educator so this educator actually issues the digital certificate to the person's wallet and then when onboarding this user as a new employee in our system we will ask the wallet to provide this digital certificate also for car rental we are making our bigger our building blocks bigger expanding the building blocks by scanning a passport with your phone and also being able to get this passport as a verifiable credential so you can prove it the

digital way also getting a mortgage you're able to all you need to provide a lot of documentation a lot of information on paper and we also want to digitalize this process using self sovereign identity so we can actually also automate automatically verify that this information that we receive is coming from government documents for example social housing so this notion of social housing is for the people with lower incomes they need to prove that they earn like between zero and forty two thousand euros a year and we also want to expand our building blocks by

including zero knowledge proof on this use case so that means that the social housing cooperation does not need to process all the raw information just the zero knowledge proof so we built some open source stuff the universal ledger agent allows you to plug in all kinds of identity protocols that you want also centralized protocols it's just a generic plug-in framework which allows you to support many many data sources and many ways of transferring

credentials so we built our own open source protocol in for exchanging verifiable credentials you can find them on the get up there and there's also a community contribution for the hyper ledger areas framework as well so we are working on getting Deus those two protocols working together in one single app so you are able to receive and send credentials using two different completely different identity protocols and this is actually a future vision that we want to work towards because you don't want to have 15 identity wallets

or apps on your phone as user you just want one app that you like the most and which is able to communicate in many protocols I think that's it's and there's like three minutes of questions I'd say so thank you so the question was if I need to prove

my identity would I be a blockchain transaction that's not the case the thing is the issuer actually issues the credential that will be given to you however this credential contains an address and aetherium address in our case and the private key which belongs to the this address is stored in the wallets of the of the user so the private key will be used to sign proof of ownership to work when when sending this data towards the verifier so in theory you can send this verifiable credential that you have received or from from other source but if you can't prove the ownership then the verifier

should not be able to or should not be accepting it because yeah the verifier wants to know for sure that you actually are the owner of the data that you send so it's all peer-to-peer communication and digital signatures generated by the identity wallet the questions okay well I think I did have like a closing slide oh here it is sorry so just feel free to contact me drop me an

email or add me on LinkedIn if you want to work together also this identity API that I mentioned before we're going to open it up so if you want to get an API key and just want to work with it just let us know and we'll just send you some documentation on this as well thank you