Three Models of Digital Identity

Today I am going to talk about Decentralized Identifiers or DIDs. The standard model of what we started before is the siloed or centralized identity. Here, you are not really you. You do not own your identity. You only had accounts on different organizations or companies. And how you use your identity, your username and password, need to have some security and standards. That is SSL/TLS. But management of several accounts had become complex over time. This has led to a more efficient model. And that is the third party IDP or federated identity. Federated identity solves the problem by putting a service provider in the middle. You have an account in the service provider and it gets confederated to different organizations. We know this on the web as social login, using twitter or google or facebook. So despite the advantage of being able to simplify authentication by using an intermediate service, a lot of challenges still exist. It inserts somewhat an intermediary into your relationships. It limits the information that you can share based on what is supported by that IDP. But the biggest challenge is no federation covers everyone that you actually need to federate with. That is where self sovereign identity model come. The third major wave. This is distinguished because now we are back to a peer-to-peer model. You as an individual, an organization or even a device, have an identity. a full peer with every other peer.

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