The Importance Of Identity For All
The Current Problem
In the physical world, we prove our identity with documents like a driver's license. These documents assert facts about us such as our name, age, or eye color. But driver's licenses don’t exist on the Internet. Instead, to prove our identity we’re forced to use a patchwork of username-password systems.
Because we deal with so many of these siloed systems, often on a daily basis, our personal information ends up being replicated and sold all across the Internet, compromising our privacy and undermining our security.
The Sovrin Solution
Sovrin is a decentralized, global public utility for self-sovereign identity. Self-sovereign means a lifetime portable identity for any person, organization, or thing. It’s a smart identity that everyone can use and feel good about. Having a self-sovereign identity allows the holder to present verifiable credentials in a privacy-safe way. These credentials can represent things as diverse as an airline ticket or a driver's license.
Sovrin identities will transform the current broken online identity system. Sovrin identities will lower transaction costs, protect people’s personal information, limit opportunity for cybercrime, and simplify identity challenges in fields from healthcare to banking to IoT to voter fraud.
A Public Good, A Unique Architecture
Read About The Sovrin Trust Framework
The Sovrin Trust Framework is the legal foundation of the Sovrin Network as a global public utility for self-sovereign identity. It is developed by the Sovrin Trust Framework Working Group and is approved by the Sovrin Foundation Board of Trustees
Read the Ecosystem and Protocol Whitepaper
Creating a robust identity platform on the internet is challenging. This paper describes how a decentralized solution built around a purpose-built blockchain and incorporating DIDs, verifiable credentials, zero knowledge proofs, and a protocol token can solve the problems of online identity and produce a truly self-sovereign identity utility.
Read The Technical Whitepaper
This white paper explores the technical foundations of the Sovrin identity network for Internet architects, analysts, and developers. In particular, the paper describes how the Sovrin architecture implements the unique combination of a public DLT for self-sovereign identity operated by permissioned nodes governed by a global non-profit foundation.
Sovrin Architecture Opportunities
Healthcare
• Sovrin prevents unwanted correlations by creating and managing one-to-one identifiers for each relationship. Pairwise pseudonymous identifiers reduce opportunities for surveillance.
• Sovrin supports trustworthy, patient-shared attributes using a built-in mechanism of verifiable claims. This avoids both myriad, costly point-to-point integrations as well as a centralized hubs.
• Sovrin provides consent receipts for memorializing promises made to patients about how their data will be used and can record patient consent.
• Sovrin allows patients to control claims made about them.
Internet Of Things
Many papers claim PKI and certificates solve the problem. But the devil’s in the details. Current best practices for certificate management leads to an IoT architecture that is unduly hierarchical. That’s a problem. Each authority verifies those lower in the hierarchy until the root certificates are embedded in the devices.
Political Constituency
This voter has four verified claims in their Sovrin agent:
1. Address Claim — A claim they live at a certain address, issued by a trusted entity (bank, utility company, or third party address verification service).
2. Constituency Claim — A claim by the NewGov Foundation or another trusted third party, based on the Address Claim, that this voter is a constituent of Congressional District 3.
3. Voter Claim — A claim that proves this is a registered voter. Ideally this would be written by the state election office.
4. Twitter Claim — A claim that proves ownership of a particular Twitter handle.
Given these claims, Sovrin can be used to create a proof that these tweets come from voters in Congressional District 3. More specifically, the proof shows a given social media account belongs to a constituent who lives in a specific political jurisdiction.
Join The Sovrin Alliance
The Sovrin Alliance is a way for individuals and organizations to get involved with The Sovrin Foundation's mission of providing self-sovereign identity for all.
Members of The Sovrin Alliance have special access to resources and development activities that create value within the Sovrin ecosystem. Alliance efforts will promote Sovrin education, collaboration, governance, transparency, and protocol development.
The Sovrin Foundation expects to release more resources as Alliance membership grows. Subscribe to be the first to learn how to officially join The Sovrin Alliance and gain access to the resources and activities that will be available to members.