Decentralization in Blockchain and its Impact on Identity
Shailaja Nitin Lohar, Sachin D. Babar · 2022
Data security has been an important aspect in the digital world. One of the technologies which has addressed this issue is Blockchain. Digital payments were the first application of Blockchain. The cryptocurrency Bitcoin was introduced for digital currency transactions. Blockchain introduced a method of interaction between two or more entities without a third party, thus eliminating the risk of trust issues. With the ever-increasing use of internet and activities on digital platforms, the trust issues among the interacting entities have been facing challenges due to third-party interruptions in authentication processes. The federated systems have made the authentication of users more dependent on certain domains, rather than giving users the ownership of their authenticity. Introducing Blockchain in this identity management of users has proved efficient and reduced the third-party dependency, too. This chapter focuses on the use of Blockchain and its underlying concepts for de-centralization in an identity management system. The chapter begins with an introduction to Blockchain and then sheds light on the de-centralization solution for identity management systems. The next part explains the concepts of self-sovereign identity, which are the base of a de-centralized identity management system. A case study explores the distributed nature of Blockchain for identity management.