Decentralized IDs through Blockchain
By Mohamed Ismail Amara
Have you ever heard of Franz Kafka? or the term Kafkaesque?
As a bohemian renowned novelist and a major figure of the 20th-century literary community, Kafka’s masterfully crafted novels such as Metamorphosis and The Trial revolve around the conundrum of bureaucracy.
In layman’s terms, bureaucracy is a hierarchical administrative system in which authority is vertically organized. Each piece of information has to pass through several levels of management before a decision can be reached.
Naturally, this process is frustratingly time consuming and debilitatingly mundane. Bureaucracy has long been the global administration's weapon of choice as it is employed in practically every government and most multinationals.
In “The Trial”, Kafka tells the story of a bank executive who gets arrested, driven to court, condemned and then executed without even knowing the crime he committed due to the enormous amount of paperwork involved in the process.
Privacy and data collection is another issue that is found yet not necessarily restricted to bureaucracy. In almost every identification experience, whether it is creating a passport, an ID or even an account on Facebook, we find ourselves obliged to provide third parties that we do not necessarily trust with extensive amounts of data and private information about ourselves.
Third-party applications are not always capable or even trustworthy of withholding our data. Last week, data relative to half a billion people users of Facebook was leaked online.
As a result of this chaotic mess, tech enthusiasts and entrepreneurs around the globe have long sought to create a decentralized system in which data is not held in the hands of a single authority but rather maintained in a blockchain. This technology offers various conditions to achieve the aforementioned goal of storing data securely without holding onto it.
In simple terms, this system creates a digital wallet in which you can store all your credentials. The information is then verified and tokenized.
Microsoft is the leading player in this field as it has already created its own platform. It will soon launch the public preview.
“Azure Active Directory verifiable credentials” basically allows you to add credentials that range from your date of birth to your university degree in your digital wallet through a two-factor code. The next time you get pulled over by authorities, you can simply provide them with those “pre-verified credentials” instead of digging out a box of cards and documents.
This revolutionized identification method will reduce the process from arduous months of paperwork verification to mere minutes of wait.
The road is certainly long and fraught with hardships but the first omens are very promising.
