Abstract :
A new form of personal identity is emerging on the Web. Decentralized identification protocols are a departure from traditional distributed authentication approaches developed for the Internet. From a technical perspective, they´re quite similar to distributed systems based on public-key infrastructures or federated identity systems, such as those proposed by the Liberty Alliance, or Microsoft´s Passport. What distinguishes the new decentralized approach is its use of URIs as the underlying identifier. The Web - using URIs as the basis for a global hypertext system of documents - set off an unprecedented explosion of human communication and knowledge sharing. So, too, could these new decentralized identity systems potentially augment the Web to let us reliably and scalably communicate with each other about our identities in a more trustworthy manner.
Keywords :
Internet; authorisation; public key cryptography; Internet; URI; World Wide Web; decentralized identification protocols; decentralized identity systems; distributed authentication; global hypertext system; human communication; knowledge sharing; personal identity; public-key infrastructures; Authentication; Control systems; Explosions; Hypertext systems; Identity management systems; Internet; Permission; Privacy; Public key; Search engines; URI; Web identity; decentralized identification protocols; uniform resource identifiers;
