Decentralized identity (also known as self-sovereign identity) is the future—and our secure digital identity, the Sudo, is opening up the possibility of decentralized identity for most people.
Decentralized identity is maturing. Many companies, organizations and individuals have been working to establish open standards for decentralized identity. Widespread adoption of decentralized identity seems to be inevitable, and companies are starting to build products around these emerging technologies.
Here at Anonyome Labs, we’re no stranger to identity. Since 2014, we’ve been delivering identity solutions to both consumers and companies. The central concept in our technology is the Sudo, an online digital identity that a user can create and manage independently from their personal identity.
The Sudo is a powerful tool that enables users to compartmentalize and protect their personal identity. Because Sudos were developed when decentralized identity was still in its infancy, the technology underlying a Sudo was built largely on the Anonyome Labs’ ecosystem and open standards. This is now changing. The Sudo is becoming vastly more powerful by incorporating the emerging standards and technologies of decentralized identity.
In addition, the new complexity brought by decentralized identity, the dizzying new set of relationships and attributes, means consumers are finding the Sudo indispensable for organizing their information in an easy-to-understand, intuitive way.
Online identity is difficult to manage. Some users freely share personal information online with many different services. This might be a phone number, email address, birthdate, name or even pictures of their children and loved ones. While the information might seem innocuous when shared with a single service, this data is often used to correlate who they are across a huge span of services. This leads to serious compromises in the user’s privacy and security. Paired with data breaches, this personal data can be used to access sensitive information, such as bank accounts.
A savvier Internet user might use several different email addresses when signing up for services, or even a different name. While this reduces the correlation of data across services, it can be challenging for even the most sophisticated of users to prevent cross-contamination of their data.
Decentralized digital identity aims to solve many of these problems by allowing users to choose what they share and with whom.
Through the cryptographic nature of DIDs and pairwise DID capabilities, decentralized identity replaces the typical email and password login with one that is unique for every service that is used. Through verifiable credentials, it allows users to better protect their personal information by only providing access to the information that is needed. Through identity hubs, they can choose where they store their data and retain full control over it. Through secure communication channels, they can ensure that the content of their communication is always private and secure, regardless of the service that they use. Through blockchain and distributed ledgers, they have a stronger basis of trust for the entire system.
But decentralized digital identity leaves them with a highly fragmented world of bits and pieces of information. The more attributes and relationships they add, the more difficult it is to manage. When they need to provide an email address to a service provider, they need to know which email address to use and where they have used it before. When they make an online purchase, they want to ensure that their credit card number is not used to associate profiles from other websites and to remember where they used that same number. And when they are browsing online, they need to ensure that their activities are not cross correlated with their personal identity.
The Sudo provides a powerful way for the user to both organize and properly compartmentalize everything they do online. Sudos mirror how people live offline and leverages the tendency of the mind to compartmentalize information. Instead of memorizing hundreds of pieces of information, a user wants to place items in ‘baskets’ and use those baskets to find the items themself. Sudos are on a critical path to making decentralized identity usable to most people.
Want to know more about the newly released MySudo virtual cards? Read this.
