[SSI 101] Part 1: Online identity and the history of identifiers
A jargon-free deep dive on online identity, identifiers, and their role in a WEB3 world. This article is Part 1 of Hypersign’s Explainer Series on Self Sovereign Identity.
Much of our lives are spent online these days. We communicate, work, play, shop, date, get informed, find inspiration, wind down and a whole lot more, through a handful of online service providers (SP) like Youtube, Uber, Instagram, and the like. These services need a way to identify us; thus, during a hasty sign-up process where we definitely paid attention to all the check-boxes and pages of terms and conditions, unique identifiers are allocated to us by these providers.
This is essentially what makes up our identities on the internet — a few usernames, email addresses, social media handles, and other unique IDs that providers forced us to select in order to access their services. And what began as a slightly annoying but kinda-fun novelty back in the day (looking at you catlover420@hotmail.com), now represents crucial pieces of information that are used to authenticate a person and defines what levels of access they’re allowed.
Basically, these identifiers prove and define your very existence on the internet.
How were these identifiers traditionally created?
Traditionally, there were two ways to manage internet identifiers.
The Silo Model, where users register themselves and create an identifier for every service they use on the internet. Usernames and passwords, essentially.
And, the Federated Model, where users register themselves with a trusted third-party provider (also called identity providers, or IdPs) like Google, Facebook, email providers and telecom operators, and select one identifier that could be used to access any service provider. This is also called SSO, or a Single Sign-On. Examples of these kinds of identifiers are social and email logins, phone-based OTPs, etc. It’s the “Sign in with Facebook” option.
These approaches worked well enough in the past but as the internet has evolved their suitability has diminished and significant drawbacks have emerged — in the areas of privacy and centralization specifically.
Join us in the next blog where we discuss these problems and introduce WEB3.
Side Note: This series is intended to be a basic, easy-to-understand introduction to SSI, but for a much deeper dive, check out Hypersign Labs — our technical blog. Here’s a good place to start on SSI:
