Diro: A Decentralized Identity & Access Management (dIAM)

The digital world today lack some credible identity system that is universally consumable and can be trusted by counter parties across industries. Also, all crowd sourcing based solutions lack credibility and verification hat is needed to address regulatory requirements. Getting all the industries, governments and consumers across hundreds of jurisdictions to agree on a framework has been a challenge. The problem has been part technical and part political. Although, a great deal has already been written on challenges in creating universal identity (Vinay Gupta, 2017).

Owning identity itself is hard for individuals
Verifying real identities requires mass consensus and adoption
Centralized systems are unreliable in long term due security and political risks
Identities need to constantly remain validated and updated
Limitations of mass adoption by different stakeholders.

As digital technologies are rapidly adopted with smartphone penetrations slated to reach 4 billion by 2022 and new technologies like IOT, blockchain, AR/VR and digital currencies getting ready for mainstream adoption, the need for cybersecurity has never been greater. The Chairman of IBM calls it the “greatest threat to every profession, every industry, every company in the world”. Cisco cites a report saying it will be more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined. ATT calls it the greatest transfer of economic wealth in history.

The identity data today, lies fragmented and owned by different corporations, having conflicting monetization objectives. It’s often secured by fragile passwords or rely on one-time passwords for recovery that are easy to hack with commonly available tools. With the explosion of web content and services, it has become hard to keep track of logins, profiles and passwords. MSISDN based one-time passwords still offer a temporary relief but the system is extremely vulnerable to hacking, lacks identity attributes and has no identity verification.

On the other hand, social networks are limited by the number of people who join, remain centralized and committed to conflicting incentives to monetizing the identity data they are trusted with. They often subject the users to undesirable social noise and comparison. This positions them at odds with consumers volunteering data to build strong profiles. Further, the social footprint created on such networks still rely on the users to update the social profile without any real external validations. This has enabled the prevalence and spread of fake identities.

Using cryptography and blockchain to decentralize Identity

The Federated Identity and entitlement is a key part of distributed architecture. As the world is gradually moving towards ambient computing, the physical world will seamlessly merge with the digital world to create next-gen UX based on augmented reality, virtual reality & IoT devices. Trustless identities are needed for security & context for enabling this nextgen digital engagement & smart contracts (Active Contacts- dApps). Further, universally reliable identities provide accountability in the digital world while making regulatory oversight possible. By having accountability across the ecosystem through reliable identities, Diro solves multiple issues like theft, corruption, tax evasion or fraud. Further Information is provided in the Whitepaper.

SUMMARY & CONCLUSION

Contact directories offer a rapid method to validate digital identities using SPKI to do social KYC. It further offers a possibility of strong identity authentication through live interactions with human confirmations over voice and video calls. Voice and video conversations offer a continuous stream of strong authentication to digital identities.

This platform scales trust with blockchain as the Identity and security for establishing trust are critical building blocks on blockchain. Contact directories or social graphs are a central component in decentralizing the identity and access management.

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