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Illinois Tests A Blockchain-Based Birth Registry/ID System (illinoisblockchain.tech)
An anonymous reader quotes Government Technology:
The state of Illinois, which has six blockchain pilots underway, will partner with Utah-based Evernym for a birth registry pilot meant to individualize and secure identities... The endeavor, one of six distinct blockchain explorations Illinois began last summer with a working group, is expected to utilize the Sovrin Foundation's publicly available distributed identity ledger and expand upon accomplishments of the W3C Verifiable Claims Task Force, the state said... Recognizing that identity -- and, now, digital identity -- begin at birth, the state will explore using these technologies to create "a secure 'self-sovereign' identity for Illinois citizens during the birth registration process," it said in the announcement.
More from the Illinois Blockchain Initiative site: Self-sovereign identity refers to a digital identity that remains entirely under the individual's control. A self-sovereign identity can be efficiently and securely validated by entities who require it, free from reliance on a centralized repository. Jennifer O'Rourke, Blockchain Business Liaison for the Illinois Blockchain Initiative commented, "To structurally address the many issues surrounding digital identity, we felt it was important to develop a framework that examines identity from its inception at child birth... Identity is not only foundational to nearly every government service, but is the basis for trust and legitimacy in the public sector."
In the proposed framework, government agencies will verify birth registration information and then cryptographically sign identity attributes such as legal name, date of birth, sex or blood type, creating what are called "verifiable claims" or attributes. Permission to view or share each of these government-verified claims is stored on the tamper-proof distributed ledger protocol in the form of a decentralized identifier... This minimizes the need for entities to establish, maintain and rely upon their own proprietary databases of identity information.
Evernym's "Chief Trust Officer" sees the program as "a major contribution to the larger effort of solving the online identity problem."
More from the Illinois Blockchain Initiative site: Self-sovereign identity refers to a digital identity that remains entirely under the individual's control. A self-sovereign identity can be efficiently and securely validated by entities who require it, free from reliance on a centralized repository. Jennifer O'Rourke, Blockchain Business Liaison for the Illinois Blockchain Initiative commented, "To structurally address the many issues surrounding digital identity, we felt it was important to develop a framework that examines identity from its inception at child birth... Identity is not only foundational to nearly every government service, but is the basis for trust and legitimacy in the public sector."
In the proposed framework, government agencies will verify birth registration information and then cryptographically sign identity attributes such as legal name, date of birth, sex or blood type, creating what are called "verifiable claims" or attributes. Permission to view or share each of these government-verified claims is stored on the tamper-proof distributed ledger protocol in the form of a decentralized identifier... This minimizes the need for entities to establish, maintain and rely upon their own proprietary databases of identity information.
Evernym's "Chief Trust Officer" sees the program as "a major contribution to the larger effort of solving the online identity problem."
All the blockchain ideas are incredibly stupid. It's like a law of nature. Just take any idea, add "blockchain", "sovereign", "decentralized" and it becomes instantly trendy.
No, blockchain won't help you to establish your identity. It's your private key that you use to sign blockchain updates that establishes it. And if your key is stolen then it's game over for you - somebody ELSE will be owning your identity. Forever. With no recourse for you.
All realistic proposals (including the one in TFA) include key revocation protocols through some kind of central authority (i.e. government), at which point the whole system becomes indistinguishable from a simple centralized database.
Actually, since we're talking about data that can be changed and/or corrected over time, it is vital to store all this data as an initial set, accompanied by precisely timestamped changes. Because if something occurred when the data was incorrect, or with a previous version of the data, then that exact situation needs to remain preserved for posterity.
If I sign my name to a contract today and I legally change my name tomorrow, then that contract needs to remain valid. Having a tamper-proof ledger that correctly records what my name was at the time of the signing, and what my name is right now, means that no-one can claim the contract is no longer valid just because of the name change.
Hmm... last time I checked the side of The Party pushing for national ID was the democrats and the republican side was strictly opposing it.
Did something change since the prez election?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Actually it's unlikely to happen anytime soon. Why? Because it would be INCREDIBLY profitable if you could do it. You think there aren't already thousands of highly trained and motivated security gurus working day and night trying to crack that? If you can do that, all of the bitcoins in the world could be yours!
This is how you find a secure technology for your application. Find one where cracking it would be insanely profitable and such a hack would instantly be noticed. If it's still secure after a few years, it probably is.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Did something change since the prez election?
Everything changes after presidential elections; good becomes bad and bad becomes good, depending on your pov. You must be new here.
"If lots of people are working on something and it isn't done yet, it must be impossible."
And that's why SHA-1 is still considered completely secure? I mean, it was introduced in 1995 and nobody had found a weakness in it by 2004. 9 years without being cracked clearly means it's unbreakable, right?
And distributed blockchain has been around since 2008. 9 years without being cracked. Clearly it will never be cracked, right?
Wow, what an incredibly boring application.
Who is going to validate the block chain? What is their incentive? How are we going to trust it any better than we currently trust the state department of records? What exactly are we gaining by this?