Digital identity should never have an absolute shape, form, value, appearance, structure, format, display. Humans are capable of recognizing and validating an identity in distributed form. In fact, fundamental nature of any identity is that it is always distributed.
A few computer technologists thought the absolute form of the identity should be an unrecognizable secret (the password) only known to the user. Well, they soon realized what gets typed on a machine is not a secret. So the next generation promoted encrypted password.
Later they told us that secret codes (OTP) generated at the time of transaction are going to solve the problem of identity theft, well, it didn’t. Some came up with secret questions/ answers, secret images, challenges.
None of this has been able to solve the fundamental problem of safety of online transactions due to the absolute nature of the digital identity.
The solution was always in Cryptography. Public key cryptography has been the closest to obviate the problem of stealing digital identity.
However, it too relied on absolute secrets and needed a great deal of infrastructural investment. This made it impossible for ever evolving businesses to adopt public key infrastructure widely.
As we speak today the businesses are hyper-connected, that is they are connected across devices, people, applications and companies. The hyper-connected nature of business makes the problem of stealing digital identity even worse. Because a compromised digital identity of something or someone at one point in the hyper-connected mesh on digital network causes the entire business network to become vulnerable.
This brings us to a key question, why can’t have digital identities to be maintained as distributed, amorphous and contextual in the digital world just like they are in the physical world?
So what’s the solution?
Scalable cryptography has the solution. The Cryptographic means that can maintain and consume digital identity in a distributed format provide an secure digital identity.
Every transaction is a message strictly accompanied by Cryptographic digital identities of all participating entities.
Such Cryptographic means must be
1. Highly scalable unlike its older avatar of PKI.
2. Usable across multiple hyper-connected businesses.
3. Not requiring business to heavily invest in infrastructure for upgrading to cryptographic security.
At Fortytwo42 Labs we are provisioning secure self-sovereign digital identities through our innovations in this space.