The vicissitudes of the Internet era go all the way forward. The”Read-only” of Web1 era makes the user the receiver and consumer of information. The”Read-write” of Web2 era makes UGC bring the wave, the authority of national creation promotes the diversity and prosperity ，but also brings the good and bad intermingled network chaos, personal IP/network identity gradually in the rich applications to highlight. As the internet revolution iterates,it is foreseeable that web 3 will bring us the ownership of data and information, the ownership of personal identity. How it’s done, how it lands, depends on the underlying infrastructure.
Web2 identity and Web3 identity
Before going into details on how Decentralized Identifiers can be an infrastructure for the creation and development of Web 3 identities, let’s compare Web2 and Web3 identities. It is important to note that what is mentioned here is the digital identity of activities on the Internet.
Web2 identity authentication system, centralized identity + traditional account and password login, are suitable for the early stage of the Internet. But its shortcomings have also been exposed. User names and passwords are still the dominant examples. But they have long been proven to be unsafe models. While social login such as Wechat and QQ can be used in China, Gmail can be used in foreign countries, but a person’s digital life is connected to applications that the number of passwords is not less than dozens. While third-party software can help manage users’ multiple passwords, it needs to be centrally managed in the form of an organization or company, and individual users don’t actually have their online identities. At the same time, users use a centralized account to obtain a variety of services, having the problem of being stolen,being supervised, being abused, and having cumbersome processes to create and retrieve. The core issue of Web2 identity is data sovereignty, while Web3 identity returns individual ‘s control and sovereignty over their own data
The decentralized identity DID proposed in the context of Web3 is designed from the perspective of user’s personal data sovereignty and control rights. Web3 decentralized identity protocol can help users better aggregation of digital identity, multidimensional data, privacy protection, being made into NFT etc. The openness and decentralized nature of the data on the chain makes the user’s Web3 identity secure, anonymous and autonomous.
What is”DID”
DID whose literally translation as decentralized identity. W3C’S DID specification is a widely accepted standard, this paper will interpret DID that basing on W3C’s technical report. The decentralized identifier (DID) defined in the Web3 specification is a new globally unique identifier. They are designed to enable individuals and organizations to generate their own identifiers using systems they trust. These new identifiers enable entities to prove control over them by authenticating them with cryptographic certificates, such as digital signatures. DID is an address that someone can own and control directly on the internet. It can be used to find the DID documents for the connection, which contains DID-related information. The DID documents contain information about enabling use cases, such as login, data encryption, communication, and so on. Cryptographic proofs (such as digital signatures) allow entities to prove control over these identifiers. The basic structure is as follows:
The composition of DID
Did is a simple text string consisting of three parts: 1) DID URI scheme identifier, 2) DID Method identifier, and 3) DID Method specific identifier.
DID Subject
By definition, the body of a DID is an entity identified by the DID, which can also be a DID controller. Anything can be the subject of DID: people, groups, organizations, things, or concepts. The DID Subject is represented using the id attribute in the DID document. You can use the DID method to create an intermediate representation of a DID document that does not contain an ID attribute. A DID Subject can have multiple identifiers for different purposes and support different times of existence.
DID Controller
The DID controller is the entity that has the authority to make changes to the DID document. The process of authorizing the DID controller is defined by the DID method. This capability is usually declared by the control of a set of encryption keys used by software on behalf of the controller, although it can also be declared by other mechanisms. A DID may have multiple controllers, and the DID subject may be or may be one of the DID controllers.
Verifiable Data Registries
To be parsed into DID documents, a DID is usually recorded on some underlying system or network. Regardless of the specific technology used, any system that supports recording DID and returning the data needed to generate DID documents is called a verifiable data registry. Examples include distributed books, decentralized file systems, any type of database, peer-to-peer networks, and other forms of trusted data storage.
DID Documents
The DID documents contain information about DID. They typically represent authentication methods, such as encrypting public keys, and services related to interacting with DID subjects.
Did Methods
The DID method is a mechanism for creating, parsing, updating and deactivating specific types of DID and their associated DID documents.
DID Resolvers and DID Resolution
The DID Resolvers is a system component, it takes a DID as input and generates a compliant DID documents as output. This process is called DID parsing. The steps for parsing a particular type of DID are defined by the associated DID method specification.
This article will only explain the basic relationship from the architecture, such as need to know more technical analysis, code demonstration and practice operations such as DID URL Dereferencing .You can refer directly to the W3C output original report : Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0. In short, DID acts as an identity center. Users can control their centers, and they can decide when, with whom, and under what conditions to display their elements of digital identity. With the widespread adoption of DID standards, individuals will not be locked into a single ecosystem or isolated approach, that is achieving individual ownership of data.
The technical advantages of DID
The DID developer community proposes that, in contrast to the traditional PKI-based identity (Public Key Infrastructure), the distributed digital identity system based on blockchain has the characteristics of ensuring the authenticity of data, protecting the privacy of users, and being portable, etc. It has four advantages:
Decentralization: Based on the blockchain, the identity data is not controlled by a single centralized authority.
The establishment of distributed trust: distributed trust is the foundation of digital identity, its core is based on the blockchain created DID with decentralized and immutable properties. The user’s DID is not given by a single organization, but is generated by the user according to a certain algorithm, and is completely controlled by the user.
Self-controlled identity: Each user’s identity is not controlled by a trusted third party, but by its owner, the individual can manage their own identity.
Trusted data exchange: identity-related data is anchored on the blockchain, and the authentication process does not need to depend on the application providing the identity.
DID and SocialFi
Tied to the identity system are social products, of course, and DID is seen as the underlying infrastructure of SocialFi. SocialFi had come out applications and products as early as 2015, but it didn’t get response because of the immature infrastructure, lacking of technology and market nurturing environment, and its products are also not very innovative, At the same time, the migration cost of social products is very high, wechat just launched with a large number of QQ users to transfer, but its experience can not be reused, the costs and methods involved in its transfer give us a glimpse of the same scenario that is coming. How to reduce the user’s access barriers and transfer costs, but also the development of social Web3 is a difficult challenge. Centralized social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are also exploring and experimenting with Web3, but as vested interests in Web2, they are not a force for the digital identity revolution. In fact, the development of DID is the pre-dawn and hard foundation of SocialFi and the entire Web3.
The consensus is that the Web3 application layer needs to be better developed with the infrastructure in place. The development of DID will improve the infrastructure and provide SocialFi with a more suitable greenhouse environment and technical support. Web3 SocialFi, which gives back ownership of data and builds social graphs, has a lot of potential and space, and it’s only a matter of time before it’s rich upper-layer applications and usage scenarios.
The latest DID in Polkadot
The highlight of the DID project on the Polkadot is Litentry, a decentralized cross chain identity aggregator that links user identities across multiple networks. Its protocol can be widely used in DeFi, on-chain governance and custom data services. Recently Litentry partnered with blockchain infrastructure provider NodeReal to enable Web3 users and decentralized application (dAPP) developers to make the most of Web3 without compromising user privacy.
PNS, one of the Litentry collaborations, is also the DID infrastructure for the Polkadot Ecosystem, providing users with identity cards and symbols in the Polkadot Ecology and community. They provide the user with .dot as the unique domain name with the suffix. Each PNS domain comes with a free Web3Profile. The Web3Profile can be used to display on-chain data, NFT, and Web2 social platform accounts, providing a fast-track to building up on-chain digital identities.
Late last month, PNS announced a partnership with SubQuery. Choosing to use the Polkadot ecosystem of SubQuery as a data indexing engine, building a chain of data indexing, improving the user experience.
The relationship between DID and data also reinforces our expectation that DID will allow data sovereignty to be securely exchanged with users, and that developers will be better able to develop decentralized applications based on it. The ecological DID project will be led by pioneers who will increasingly connect ecology, communities, users, and the entire Web3.
Predictably, DID has enormous potential. From the existing use cases, DID can be used as a sign-on verification system, can be used as a basis for credit scoring, can be made into NFT, can be used as an individual’s identity and contribution record in the Web3 world, and it is an important infrastructure for protecting user identity, data, and the blockchain network. We expect DID to be applied to everyone’s daily digital lives. At that time, the age of Web3 was really coming. Web3 identity really belongs to everyone.
References:
https://did.baidu.com/use-case/
https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/#did-syntax
https://medium.com/amber-group/decentralized-identity-passport-to-web3-d3373479268a
PNS partner with SubQuery to build the Polkadot DID Infrastructure
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