China has fully entered a new era of building a digital economy. Digital identity authentication and management and user privacy protection have become one of the core issues that cannot be avoided in the development of the digital economy. Recently, at the "2020 Trusted Blockchain Summit", the "Blockchain Application Service Based on Trusted Digital Identity" was led by the First Research Institute of the Ministry of Public Security, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, and Beijing Zhongdun Anxin Technology Development Co., Ltd. The white paper was officially released.
Chain new (ID: ChinaBlockchainNews) original
Author | Feng Ming
Edit | Yin Yue
China has fully entered a new era of building a digital economy. Digital identity authentication and management and user privacy protection have become one of the core issues that cannot be avoided in the development of the digital economy. Recently, at the "2020 Trusted Blockchain Summit", the "Blockchain Application Service Based on Trusted Digital Identity" was led by the First Research Institute of the Ministry of Public Security, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, and Beijing Zhongdun Anxin Technology Development Co., Ltd. The white paper was officially released.
Hao Jiuyue, the leader of the TBI digital identity project team and an associate researcher of the First Research Institute of the Ministry of Public Security, said that digital identity is becoming more and more important as a basic support in the construction of digital China. On the one hand, blockchain has become an important direction for the construction of digital China and the deep integration of science and technology. On the other hand, the innovative application of blockchain and trusted digital identities is one of the important research directions of the country. "Trusted digital identity is a bridge between on-chain and off-chain, and a bridge for blockchain to move towards compliance supervision. It can be said that the healthy development of blockchain is inseparable from the support of trusted digital identity."
Blockchain empowers digital identity management
"Since ancient times, China has been a country of trust, advocating a culture of trust. But after entering the new era, the requirements for trust in social development have become more and more stringent, and the crisis of trust has become increasingly serious and needs to be resolved. Here is a prominent problem. Identification, who are you?" Pang Yinming, chairman, president and founder of Lianji Technology, said to Lianxin.
China is at a critical stage of digital transformation, and digital identity management is also facing many problems. Like the virtual identity of the traditional Internet, digital identity is not the real identity of the user, it is an anonymous identity that relies on encryption technology. Although the technology represented by the blockchain can solve the online credibility problem, it cannot solve the offline authenticity problem. Therefore, the identification of digital identity and the authentication of real identity have become key propositions.
"The main problem with current digital identity management is that the identity in the digital world can correspond to the real body in the real world, because most scenes have real rights and obligations, and are bound by real laws." Jiang Hai said to "Chain New".
“Current users’ digital identity information often exists in different departments, industries, and companies. Their respective digital identity systems are not connected to each other. The same individual’s information is isolated in different centralized systems, and the systems are mutually authenticated. The process is complicated and it is difficult to conduct consistent and coordinated management." Huang Bin, senior director of blockchain products at Shenzhen Fada Network Technology Co., Ltd. (Fada), told Lianxin.
At present, although the network identities of the major platforms have basically achieved real-name, users have only obtained identity authentication and have not really controlled the control of identity information, and many problems have arisen accordingly. In addition, the identity authentication methods of various departments and platforms are relatively simple and inefficient, which hides a greater risk of personal privacy information leakage, which may cause user information to be trafficked and cause serious property and related profit losses.
"If users know that they can control their identifiable information, then they will be more likely to share this information." Huang Bin told Lianxin that blockchain technology is very suitable for managing consent and personal identifiable information. Control authority. "Because this technology can be self-managed, there is no need to rely on a centralized control agency. On the blockchain, smart contracts can be embedded with rules to effectively automate the selective participation process. These rules can determine who has the right to collect identity-related data , Who has access to this data, and what level of detail can be learned."
In the centralized digital identity system, the user only has the access right to the account. Logging in is actually a process by the service provider to check whether the user has the account access authority; while in the decentralized digital identity system, no login password is required, and the user passes Keeping private keys to manage their own identities and related operations, users' control and control over their digital assets are greatly enhanced, and user privacy is better protected.
"In terms of digital identity, the role of blockchain technology lies in the cross-system identity, that is, the identity on the chain, which can be used in multiple systems." Jiang Haixiang said, "Chain New".
"It is impossible for companies or national governments to manage personal identity information across multiple unrelated platforms to satisfy everyone. Blockchain technology happens to have advantages in this respect. It has a distributed architecture and can Ensure that enterprise applications are fully interoperable and span multiple industries and ecosystems. At the same time, the consent and control authority for personal data on the blockchain network can be managed from a single access point." Huang Bin told Lianxin .
Multi-party cooperation to build a great cause
"Now everyone has high expectations for blockchain technology. As an emerging technology, blockchain technology is being promoted by the government and the industry is also exploring, but there are still many areas for improvement." Pang Yinming said, " "Blockchain + digital identity" has great application value in the entire social life, such as e-commerce, e-government, etc., and the landing scene is broad. "The distributed storage mechanism of blockchain technology makes digital identities harder to be tampered with and more reliable; in addition, the mechanism of public and private key authorization and encryption of blockchain technology can make information better protected."
According to the IDCFutureScape report, “Identity will be the new security line of defense. By 2022, 150 million people will have blockchain digital identities, which are analyzed by verifying the identity of each user, verifying each device, restricting access and privileges, and relying on machine learning. We act and get deeper insights from it."
Pang Yinming also pointed out that the current blockchain technology has some development bottlenecks, such as storage speed. In terms of processing massive data, the improvement of efficiency depends on the improvement of technology. In terms of application implementation, whether companies with different ownership, different types, and different business models can guarantee the objectivity of applications, whether they will create new data monopolies, etc., are all worthy of attention. Whether companies with different ownerships, different types, and different business models have sufficient efficiency and enthusiasm, and whether they have enough profit space to do related things, also need to be considered. In addition, in the specific implementation process, also need to consider the issue of cost input, such as the construction of IDC data center and so on.
Jiang Haixiang said to "Chain New" that, at present, the effect of "blockchain + digital identity" is general, and most of them are based on "fake" chain identities in the name of centralization, and there is no very reliable profit model. "Pseudo-demand is the biggest development bottleneck of the blockchain. The implementation of blockchain technology is not a risk in itself, but the obstacle lies in the real demand. In other words, which scenarios really require a blockchain, or where does the blockchain start? What effect did it achieve."
Bin Huang believes that there are three main difficulties in the use of blockchain combined with digital identity: one is the low performance of blockchain technology and data privacy protection technology; the other is the conflict between user privacy protection and the business model of enterprise data monetization. Under the premise that secure multi-party computing is very immature, at present, to protect user privacy, only authentication can be authorized, and the inability to authorize identity information may lead to no incentive for enterprises to participate; third, DID and private keys are difficult to remember, and users themselves are required Save, the threshold for users is higher.
"Not all blockchain facilities are equal. Fundamentally speaking, a strong, credible, and data-integrated protocol will eventually win. Industry alliances are the best way to develop these strong standards." "New" said.
There are also views that the source of digital identity requires a strong endorsement agency, that is, a strong centralized agency such as the state to endorse. The establishment of digital identity authentication must start with the government, use fingerprints and photos registered in the public security identity system as authenticity verification methods, establish an interconnected and mutually recognized identification network such as finance, taxation, customs, and transportation. Only by ensuring that the information on each application side is not leaked after authentication can it really work.
"If identity authentication is done at the national level, it needs to involve some coordination work between public security, civil affairs and other departments, and it needs to break the problem of data islands. This requires relevant national departments to come out and do related things, and regard it as a future. Great cause can be done well."