Proofing- A brighter, simpler future enabled by DLT based Identity

“What the heck even is proofing?” -Asked by no one, but I needed an intro.

I’m lazy, so here’s a glossarial definition stolen directly from our friends over at Gartner to define Proofing:

“Verifying people’s identities before the enterprise issues them accounts and credentials, are based on “life history” or transaction information aggregated from public and proprietary data sources”.

Basically, Proofing allows the “Who are you?” question to be answered in a way that powers entire networks, services, and ecosystems around you.

I believe proofing is one of the single most subtly disruptive facets of Distributed Ledger Technology that is flying under the radar of public interest, and its implications are far reaching.

At first glance, Proofing may seem irrelevant for anyone outside the financial, healthcare, public customer (B2C) facing businesses, or Government Organizations.

Dig deeper and you’ll find that individuals stand to benefit most from its adoption.

Proofing and Privacy- ID theft and Security

The American Dream is built on using wealth, in whatever amount you have it, as collateral to take on debt in the pursuit of more wealth over the long term.

There is a whole culture built around credit scores, because it generally decides your life trajectory.

Start off with a 650 in your twenties, and you still have a long road ahead. 600 or below and you cannot even rent certain apartments, much less buy a house (or at least get a reasonable loan term for one).

Heck, even the dating game is different now; Many people will factor in a partner’s credit worthiness when making long term relationship decisions.

When a baby is born in these United States, the child receives a birth certificate, and later on a Social Security Number. Till the day that child is an adult and eventually passes on to the great beyond, those 2 pieces of information are attached to their existence.

SSNs in particular are so closely tied to the American Dream that having it compromised is akin to living a nightmare.

Identity theft in America is rampant, and according to a recent report by CNBC, Identity fraud cost Americans a total of about $56 billion last year, with about 49 million consumers falling victim. In an age where security, especially digital security, has become such a huge focus, it begs the question as to why this is such a Goliath issue.

We believe the reason for this is that the times haven’t kept up with the tech. Specifically, society hasn’t adopted the appropriate technology solutions to keep up with a rapidly digitizing, information sharing based society.

Implications of adopting proofing technology over the long-term would mean raw SSN sharing becoming a thing of the past. Sharing would involve the use of tokenized data to represent validity of a person’s existence as a member in the Social Security System, thereby safeguarding that number regardless of where that token is shared.

It would mean no more showing a driver’s license to buy a pack of smokes, revealing way more than just your age with every interaction. It would mean no tracking, amalgamation, or storage of personal data across multiple channels, Corporate or Government, without your express, fine-grained consent.

Being able to Tokenize and share data selectively, irrespective of the service, and without revealing information to third party services removes an entire vector of digital risk from American daily life. In its purest form, proofing puts the power of information into the hands of the person who it belongs to: You.

Proofing and Secure Convenience- A look at US Immigration

Without legal Immigration status, you can’t open bank accounts, investment accounts, activate retirement benefits, benefit from social security (even though you still have to contribute to it on your taxes irrespective of your immigrant status), vote, or even obtain a driver’s license.

My fellow immigrants will know this, but we spend more time in the DMV than anyone else in this country because our licenses to drive are only valid up to the date our immigration documents are valid, which is silly in and of itself because many immigrants whose documentation expires are waiting for renewals from USCIS that take what feels like a century due to inexplicably awful processing times.

If you end up being one of the many folks in this exact scenario, a mix up in the mail can also further hamper your ability to live your life, that while you are technically in a legal status you don’t have documentation in hand to prove it.

Most immigration applications receive automatic extensions on their status just by putting in an application, irrespective of its eventual approval or denial simply on receipt of an application, but even this seemingly automatic process can take months because of the manual way this is done.

Proofing, as a concept and technical application, allows for the digitization of records of this nature in a secure manner (in a distributed ledger on a private or public blockchain) that also get tagged with validity and update requirements for each individual document.

So, for something like your Birth certificate, instead of submitting it repeatedly, you would be able to obtain a proof of it from the issuing authority that says you are who you say you are, and that your birth certificate is valid and usable for the foreseeable future and can be used with ANY 3rd party service that requires it without sharing the actual document.

For a document like a driver’s license that expires every 5 years and requires renewal, a digital version of it not only reduces time spent at the DMV, but saves in cost of issuing a license, and the material cost that goes into printing them.

For frequently changing factors like your address, a proofing authority for address validation that utilizes power bills, or other traditional proofs for address like lease documents could be utilized to keep address information up to date and sent as a digital proof for USCIC and other services to use.

Further than this, proofing can eliminate the need to ever enter facilities like the DMV for both immigrants and citizens. With a proofed DIGITAL birth certificate, Address, and SSN (not the number, the proof only) and if an immigrant provides a DIGITAL USCIS proof of valid status (eliminates the mail problem, and lag issue), the DMV has everything it needs to auto-resolve cases without ever entering the place.

In states like Georgia, for citizens and immigrants alike, your temporary license is a printed sheet of paper with no special characteristics, so issuing this document via the internet backed by digital proofing technologies is a rational and effective application of this technology.

Proofing and Hiring- Get WHO you paid for

If you’ve ever been a contractor, or worked with one, you know there is a multi-billion-dollar industry behind staffing across the globe. In the United States alone, staffing accounts for a whopping $136.4 Billion.

For what essentially boils down to middlemen peddling qualified personnel to likely suitors who would otherwise invest in talent and recruiting in-house, this is a gold-mine industry, especially in IT. We are and have been beneficiaries of being strong staffing organization ourselves, so our perspective on the matter isn’t just anecdotal.

For a comical, yet decidedly risqué metaphor for the staffing business model, one needn’t look any further than the sale of narcotics. You find a resource, quantify and qualify it based on a series of factors; Is it in demand? Does it provide healthy margins? Is it a reliable product? Will it lead to return buyers?

While that is a bit of an oversimplification, the gist is still the same; When you need personnel who have been vetted and have a tried-and-true resume and a history of success, you work with a reputable staffing agency that has battle tested product ready to roll into the office Monday morning.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds though, as staffing agencies don’t only validate employment verifications, identities, and work histories. We check for “fit”, which is interview upon interview to align candidates’ advertised experience with reality, and potential suitors. Based on the role, staffing agencies are expected to have in-house experience that can sniff out fakes, and crafted identities during these steps so that you don’t have to.

However, even the best process has chinks, and the fakes always find a way to get through.

Two weeks ago, a client of ours who works with multiple major staffing agencies had put out a candidate requisition for a support and administrative role to all its staffing partners.

One of their major partners, who I will not name, filled the requirement only to find out two weeks into the start of the project that the resource had lied about their location, and was using real details for a US Citizen and a VPN connection to take on someone’s identity and fill the requirement from a foreign country.

Top it off that the requirement was for a US citizen who would be paid US rates and had to work on US hours… Didn’t look good for anyone involved.

Sometimes, in this business you have to go through multiple staffing agencies to get a resource. The chain of middlemen can get a bit crazy before you actually end up with your Monday morning hire, and that person can end up being extremely expensive as a result of inevitable markups at each point in the chain.

Corp 2 Corp hiring is prevalent, and popular between staffing agencies, where a resource is acquired through contract with their W2 firm for presentation to an end client with significant markup and potential for fakes as a result.

A solution, and potential major disrupter to this business model is proofing in hiring; Giving client businesses direct vetting, history, and qualification ability through employment history, testimonial, and background proofing for safer, more secure hiring that takes the middleman out of the picture.

Don’t get it twisted; I, like many others have made a pretty penny placing skilled talent where it belongs, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that what we do is just primed for disruption and eventual elimination by DLT and proofing technologies that make it easy to find qualified personnel, and extremely difficult to game the system.

The Politics of it all- Proofing and Voting

Voting rights is a difficult subject to cover, and I could opine the politics of it all for hours on how today’s voter registration, validation, voting, and processing could use a total overhaul. However, to keep it simple, lets all unify under the belief that we all want only legal US Citizens and voters to be able to vote in elections.

Also, let us not delve too deep into the motivations political parties selectively follow when seeking representation of community needs through voting based on demographics and other suspect qualifiers when drawing up districts.

In other words, for a few minutes, let us ignore 100+ years of history and the current political climate so we can pretend that everyone believes a successful election is a near 100% turnout of all eligible voters in the country, and not the outcome of that election itself.

Politics brushed aside, the best way to do this without arguing about Voter ID laws, or other coals that fuel the debate on voting and all that comes with it is to provide voters with a system that allows voting from anywhere within the United States, securely, while validating the identity of the voter at the same time. This requires trust in the systems that exist to provide this service, and trust in the processes that go into authenticating and maintaining this service.

Identity Proofing, by virtue of its current applications in authenticating identities for high-privilege services like banking and exchange markets, as well as in healthcare and high-security industries, is the future of voting. Identity proofing solves the issue of misrepresented votes, or perceived fake voting with biometric data matching, SSN validation, and ID issuance and storage.

This goes back to the digital driver’s license point from before; If we can currently trust digital IDs, or validating of Identities digitally for services like banking and PII backed business, voting should be no different.

For a look at how this works today, check out Blockchain projects like Civic and 1Kosmos, who focus on incorporating the Identity proofing aspect with existing digital service meshes as 3rd party services that provide the service.

These are examples of the first steps being made toward DLT based voting systems that are all-inclusive.

THIS PART IS PURELY OPINION, IGNORE IF YOU DON’T CARE:

To me, my vote isn’t worth more than my checking account balance. The rhetoric of how valuable votes are falls flat when compared to the financial well-being of Modern America in the context of trust in Technology solutions to make processes less imprudent.

Digital voting is late, and it isn’t because we don’t know how to do it.

The motivations anyone would have to suppress this technology, to me, fall into 2 camps; distrust as a result of unintentional ignorance, or ill-gotten wisdom based entirely in self-interest without regard for how inaccessible voting affects disadvantaged people and their ability to be heard.

Either way, our belief is that the solution to voting rights, and to the issue as a whole not only exists but has been right under our noses since 2009.

In Summation

In all honesty, our goal with this publication is to encourage public advocacy for proofing technology to be implemented in a variety of sectors to logically improve daily life for the everyday Americans. To be clear, every proofing solution that we see as potentially industry changing rides on the application of Distributed Ledger Technology for security and immutability.

We do have our own beliefs about how and why the world works the way it does, and yes, it does color our opinions even in this very piece.

However, irrespective of your politics, we invite you to join discussions on these issues, especially if you have strong opinions, irrespective of what side of the aisle they fall on.

RAAH Technologies is a Cyber Security firm that specializes in architecting, building, and supporting Identity and Security solutions. Check out our blogs and case studies for more context on some of our more conversational pieces and performed work!