Blockchain Thought Leaders — Feature 2
Blockchain thought leaders is a new series where I speak to pioneers working in the blockchain space to learn their thoughts.
The second blockchain thought leader I am featuring is Thierry Bonfante. He has spent most of his career in enterprise software including cloud, mobility solutions etc. Somewhere along the line, he realized that there is a technical shift happening in the world, where decentralized blockchain solutions seem more meaningful than traditional web applications. He then became a part of the ethereum community and joined ConsenSys as Head of Product at uPort.
About uPort
uPort’s main goal is to enable self-sovereign identity, where every individual has complete control over their identity.
In the today’s world, our identity is managed mostly by big corporations and governments. We use username and passwords to access all our online information, with no control over our data if we lose our passwords. The identity system, as of today, is broken.
To be more elaborate, there are three major problems with today’s way of managing identity:
- More than 1 billion people in the world today, don’t have any form of proper identification. These people are either refugees, people living in remote areas or people living in countries with a broken government system. Without a proper identity, they are cut-off from many facilities that the rest of us have access to.
- The internet protocol that was built late last century was brilliant in many ways except that it did not have any ability to identify people who use services. Due to that, we needed to have passwords to access applications, and started relying upon third party websites that stored our passwords, who then started controlling and sometimes even monetizing our data and identity.
- Whatever access and identity information we do have, in the form of government IDs and online accounts is not secure. Data gets stolen from government databases quite often.
uPort aims to provide a solution that could fix a lot of these problems. uPort gives control of the user’s identity back to the user. This new identity is also much more secure as it is verifiable and auditable on the blockchain.
An example success story
uPort created a digital identity for the all the citizens of the entire town of Zug in Switzerland. This digital identity can be used by the citizens in place of all other previous forms of identity like registration cards, government issued IDs, library cards, etc.
In order to establish their digital identity on uPort, all the Zug citizens had to do was download the uPort application and then visit a local office once to verify their identity. Once this is done, they were able to use the uPort application as their identity to access all services currently enabled like unlocking bikes in the town, getting access to government services available to them etc.
uPort provides a new concept of Identity
Along with just being digital instead of physical, there is another very different aspect to the new form of identity.
One’s identity is no longer used for proving I am who I say I am, but instead, it’s for verifying I meet the criteria you want me to meet. On uPort, applications can issue Identity credentials. So, if someone matches a specific set of conditions, they can be issued a credential tied to their identity saying that they meet those conditions.
For example, when you go to a bar, instead of showing your entire identity information on your State-issued ID card, you could just show the uPort app, which has a QR Code. Upon scanning the QR Code, the bar can verify that you have the credential saying that you are above 21 years of age, and will let you in. In this way, you do not have to show all your information including full name, full date of birth, address etc. to everyone in order to verify your identity. You can just show enough information to get verified for the purpose needed.
Further, in this new system, a person can keep strengthening the reputation of their digital identity. As you use your digital identity and credentials at more and more places, you build up reputation and more claims that it is surely you. Hence, for a uPort identity that has been used and accepted several times, we can be more sure that this is a valid identity.
That sounds very interesting, is there any application that could benefit from this new form of identity?
Civil, an application that is based out of ConsenSys and is taking steps to transform the newspaper industry is planning to integrate with uPort’s new identity system. In today’s world, if a journalist writes a story and shares it on facebook and other sites, these third-party sites and even people who get access to the stories on these sites, monetize the story for their own benefit, with the journalist hardly getting a share of these earnings. On Civil, journalists can publish their stories, will be able to identify themselves using uPort identity in the future, and keep their creations as part of their own digital self. They can also get rewarded directly for their work on Civil.
That is fantastic. How can we use uPort’s services?
For Users — they can use the uPort Mobile app and create their account on it to establish their digital identity and unlock access to any Dapp
For Developers — they can use the uPort SDK to integrate uPort as the identity system for any application they have built or are building.
uPort has been built to integrate with any application, including both web 2.0 and web 3.0 applications. It has also been designed in a way that it is usable and easy to integrate for any developer and not just a blockchain development expert.
uPort provides various levels of verification depending on the needs of the Dapp. For some decentralized applications, establishing the user’s identity would just require their name and phone number verification, or perhaps SSN information verification, whereas for more advanced use cases like government applications, the user might have to visit a real-world physical office to get themselves verified. A developer can choose what level of verification is needed for user to establish identity on their application using the uPort SDK.
For any Dapp integrating with uPort, uPort’s identity system can be used to sign-in and launch the smart contract which runs the Dapp.
The new identity system seems like what the world needs. However, are there any challenges with implementing this new system?
The new identity system is very early stage, dealing with sensitive data and there are several regulations to comply with. For example, several identity solutions had decided to put everything on the blockchain, but that made them GDPR non-compliant. There are GDPR laws in Europe, according to which every individual has the right to be forgotten. Hence, all identity information of all users cannot be stored entirely on the blockchain, as that would make it permanent and not erasable which is not allowed by law.
In order to solve this issue, uPort stores users full identity information either on the end user device or a server side storage solution. Storing the user’s information on end user device like mobile phones is great as it puts the information fully under the control of the user, however brings its own set of challenges for recovery of identity in case device is lost, ownership of device etc. The other solution is using uPort’s server side storage which is fully encrypted even to uPort’s employees and can be erased upon request from the user, hence, giving the user the right to be forgotten.
Despite these challenges, Thierry and uPort are trying to make this new form of identity the norm in this world as it not only has the potential to create a secure verifiable identity for everyone in the world but also could enable self-sovereign identity and give the control of user’s identity back to the user.
uPort is entirely open-source and anyone can see its code and contribute to it. Thierry would encourage everyone to be a part of this ecosystem, and drive the improvement and adoption of this new identity system.
Thank you for reading.
