Agreed Jeff,

The danger is organisations try to define identity by collecting attributes that ‘proof’ the identity. 
The next thing is sharing data over this "Know Your Customer” data. Blockchain or not!

This is why a clean separation is needed between core identity (as a representation of the individual online) versus personal ‘attributes’, which is data about the individual/persona. 
As such, an identity provider is only to define and/or proof the core identity. Period. (yes we have national ID cards in Europe)

In Thomas picture, the notion of persona in fact then holds two different elements: 
- a pairwise persistent pseudonym per service provider (read: no correlation) of a fully pairwise persistent pseudonym per web service (see: privacy-preservation in deep WS call chains) 
- a persona which (can) represent a selection (think a directed graph) of contextualized personal data to be shared, possibly valid over a number of organisations within that context.

The consistent use of pairwise persistent pseudonyms solves a lot of problems by rethinking identity in a symmetrical way.
- Identity disclosure now becomes the sole prerogative of the individual
- Analytics on pairwise pseudonymous identified data now becomes much more acceptable.

We have all the above done using using a SAML-ID-WSF2 and OpenID-UMA framework. It is complex.
Time for blockchain-isch tech to make things simpler (where possible!)

Secondly, we should distance ourselves of where personal data is hosted: on premise, with the individual, in the ecosystem cloud or with a PDS vendor.  
The same authorisation methods should always be used. 

Again, I plea to follow Thomas use case, with the separation of pseudo-identifiers and persona's

Luk.   

On 8 Sep 2016, at 17:42, j stollman <stollman.j@gmail.com> wrote:

John,

With respect to your comment, "I think you have correctly identified a normative inverse relationship  between "Core Identity" attributes what should be written openly to a blockchain":

I share your belief in the separation of a Core Identity from attributes included in various personas that may be unveiled to particular RPs.  But it is not clear to me where one can draw the line.  The Core Identity needs to have enough data to authenticate the user and his/her various personas, so that the RP can then authorize activity based on the attributes provided in the persona.  But what data and how much of it do we need to unmistakably authenticate the user?  The more attributes we include in the Core Identity, the more vulnerable the user becomes to having that data used against them by an adversary who can break into the Core Identity repository.  

Jeff


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Jeff Stollman
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On Thu, Sep 8, 2016 at 7:18 AM, John Wunderlich <john@wunderlich.ca> wrote:
Thomas;

This aligns well with Canadian privacy views of a 'biographical core' and the social reality that we all have many identities that we present to the world. When I read this and note the piece that I just posted about the potential conflict between the GDPR 'right to erasure' and Blockchain, I think you have correctly identified a normative inverse relationship  between "Core Identity" attributes what should be written openly to a blockchain. Exciting work.

John Wunderlich,

Sent frum a mobile device,
Pleez 4give speling erurz

"...a world of near-total surveillance and endless record-keeping is likely to be one with less liberty, less experimentation, and certainly far less joy..." A. Michael Froomkin




On Thu, Sep 8, 2016 at 12:23 AM -0400, "Thomas Hardjono" <hardjono@mit.edu> wrote:

Folks,

This may or may not be a use-case proper for BSC-DG, but I thought I'd mention it here because its an "infrastructure" technology that supports scaling of blockchains. (analogy:  DNS is not part of Internet routing in TCP/IP, but it sure does help us use the Internet).

One of the key concepts we (at MIT) are trying to develop further in CoreID (diagram is here http://www.findthomas.net/blog/). Part of it is the idea of a new kind of identity provider called the "persona provider" (PP)

The Persona Provider could be implemented as a combination of an UMA Authorization Server combined with an UMA Resource Server. (PP = AS + RS).

When Alice creates an account at the Persona Provider (PP), she convinces the PP initially that she is legit by supplying the PP with signed assertions (blinded assertion) which the Core Identity Issuer (upstream) has created.

When Alice needs to transact on the blockchain using an anonymous-verifiable identity, she goes to her account at the PP and self-generates a transaction-identity (transaction-identifier) to be used on the blockchain or within a smart contract. She can self-generate as many transaction-identifiers as she needs -- no limit.  The PP provides the crypto-tools to do this (just like bitcoin-wallets / client softwares or PGP).

At the same time, she could optionally set policy on the account, treating the the blinded assertions (from the Core Identity Issuer) as resources.  The transaction identities (which are anonymous-verifiable strings) can also be treated as resources sitting on the PP.

The PP keeps these transaction-identifiers as long as she needs, and may even archive them.  

The PP also makes available a Identity Verification end-point (API) that allows the counter-party (RP) -- or anyone for that matter -- to verify a transaction-identifier found on a blockchain or in a smart-contract.


If this is useful, I can write it up for the use-cases page.

/thomas/
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