Microsoft just launched Decentralized Identity

[GregMagarshak]

How does this interact with or impact the SAFE network?

Is it compatible?

Decentralized Identity Solution | Microsoft Security

[bones]

Well thats a long question to answer, and being as safe is as yet unfinished, probably impossible to answer wholly.

For starters, your giving a 3rd party your data and trusting them to dish is out to the right ppl with micrisoft. Or so i would imagine. They seem to have a flashy advert promising lots of cool things with absolutely no tech ideas discussed.

Will the code be open source? Highly doubtfull imho.

Safe would be able to do similiar in a safe and secure way.

Personally i would not want all that data / proof of me, stored by a 3rd party that i was not sure was being responsible with it.

Bitcoin gave us , be your own bank.
Safe will give us, be your own data manager.

[bytes]

@GregMagarshak

Is it compatible?

No. Maybe one day. Appears to share some principles. Thanks for sharing, looks interesting.

What I’ve read so far of this seems nice and all. I think this effort is a good thing.

@bones

For starters, your giving a 3rd party your data and trusting them to dish is out to the right ppl with micrisoft. Or so i would imagine.

Their web site / documents say otherwise. Of course, you can choose to not believe them or to believe there is an ulterior motive. I’m aware of their past tendencies to push proprietary solutions over standards and be aggressive towards open source software.

@bones

Will the code be open source? Highly doubtfull imho.

For the most part they’re talking about creating an open standard (not an implementation).

@bones

Personally i would not want all that data / proof of me, stored by a 3rd party that i was not sure was being responsible with it.

They say otherwise. They seem to talk the talk, lets hope they walk the walk…

@Page 12 of PDF (https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE2DjfY)

Email addresses and social network IDs were created as human-friendly aliases for collaboration but are now overloaded to serve as the control points for data access across many scenarios beyond collaboration. This poses a potential problem, given that access to these IDs can be removed at any time by the email provider, social network provider, or other external parties.

Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) are different. DIDs are user-generated, self-owned, globally unique identifiers rooted in decentralized systems. They possess unique characteristics, like greater assurance of immutability, censorship resistance, and tamper evasiveness. These are critical attributes for any ID system that is intended to provide self-ownership and user control.

…

A common misconception about decentralized identity is that all identity data is exposed on public systems like blockchains. This is incorrect. Microsoft believes DID implementations should use decentralized systems strictly to anchor identifiers and non-PII DPKI metadata (as listed above) to enable routing and authentication for the DID owner without risk of censorship. A user’s actual identity data resides encrypted “off-chain,” under the user’s sole control. (For more details, see the “DID interaction using personal datastores” section of this document.)

I didn’t see any reference to the IETF. To me it seems a bit irregular for the W3C to undertake this. Regardless, I would like to see them succeed. If governments and corporations embrace this, it could cut down on identity theft (e.g. make it so that one day knowing someone’s social security number, date of birth, and name are basically useless to identity thieves because they can’t forge a digital signature without knowing the user’s private key).