Blockchain Identity Management
K Sneha, M. R. Manu, B. Balamurugan, S. Sreeji
Abstract
In the age of internet, everything about our personal identity can be found on the Web. Billions of email account details to millions of credit and identity data (Equifax) had compromised in the massive data breaches recently. So one of the greatest challenges faced today is identity management (IDM). Blockchain technology offers a way to prevent this problem by providing a secure solution without a central authority. People can store data on a blockchain by their own, thereby avoiding intermediaries and vulnerable servers. Information once stored is secured cryptographically and cannot be altered or deleted, thus making it secure from data breaches. This technique of IDM enhances decentralization, transparency, fault tolerance and user control in transactions that involve sensitive identity informations. The tremendous development of Bitcoin had given widespread attention and high-end research on blockchain technology. In the age of internet, everything about a person's identity can be found on the web. Billions of email account details to millions of credit and identity data (Equifax) had compromised in the massive data breaches recently. So one of the greatest challenges faced today is IDM. Blockchain technology offers a way to prevent this problem by providing a secure solution without a central authority. Blockchain is a distributed database system similar to an open, shared ledger that stores and manages transactions. Each record in the database is called a block and is cryptographically linked to the previous block. People can store data on a block by their own, thereby avoiding intermediaries and vulnerable servers. Information once stored is secured cryptographically and cannot be altered or deleted, thus making it secure from data breaches. This technique of IDM enhances decentralization, transparency, fault tolerance and user control in transactions that involve sensitive identity informations. In spite of these features, this distributed ledger technology based IDM lacks proper identity verification and classification of individuals.