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
Marketplace Solution
- Sovrin's architecture supports independent software agents to hold and process claims as well as to perform identity transactions on the identity owner's behalf. These agents interoperate directly with each other as peers. Sovrin specifies the protocols that agents use so that agents from different vendors can work together and to support substitutability.
- Sovrin uses Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs)- identifiers intended for self-sovereign, verifiable digital identities to prevent correlation, one of the major concerns of conventional identity systems. Sovrin is built from the ground up using pairwise pseudonymous identifiers to separate data from direct identifiers and reduce correlation.
- In Sovrin, mutually authenticated connections are built into every relationship. For example- when an identity holder uses Sovrin to authenticate with their bank, the bank knows it's them and the identity holder know it's the bank. Rather than an asymmetric relationship where one side uses cryptographic means to authenticate itself and the other uses a mishmash of usernames and passwords, both sides symmetrically use cryptographic technology to authenticate the other.
Government Use
- The Sovrin Network uses a purpose-built distributed ledger -- technology frequently known as blockchain -- to enable the exchange of cryptographically signed credentials. The diffuse trust model embodied in the Sovrin Network promotes independence and enhances protection from outside interference -- further placing individuals in control of their identities and at the center of their digital interactions.
- The infrastructure for ensuring consensus for identity transactions on the Sovrin Network is provided by carefully vetted group Stewards who independently own and operate their nodes on the network. Stewards work together to form a system of checks and balances.
- The Sovrin Foundation is a non-profit. We don’t actually own the network – no one owns it, but anyone can build on it, much like the Internet itself. The Sovrin Network is public: everyone can use Sovrin to establish their own digital identity, linking it to credentials from multiple sources, including governments, companies, individuals, and others.
NGO Humanitarian Mission
- The Sovrin Foundation is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization established to administer the Trust Framework governing the Sovrin Network, a public service utility enabling self-sovereign identity on the Internet. The Trust Framework is analogous to Sovrin’s constitution; it defines the business, legal and technical policies required to operate, organize, and participate in the network.
- Sovrin is a non-partisan, unbiased, non profit entity governed by a diverse Board of Trustees from varying backgrounds, countries, and industries. This body along with the Sovrin Trust Framework administered by the Sovrin Foundation, ensures that no government or corporation owns or controls the network.
- Sovrin is able to address the need for scalability and interoperability with a system of validator and observer nodes and state proofs and accessibility giving developers maximum availability with minimum cost
Get In Touch
The Sovrin Foundation is a nonprofit organization established to administer the Trust Framework governing the Sovrin Network.Intended to serve as a global public utility enabling the development of self-sovereign identity on the internet - the Sovrin Network is operated by independent Stewards and uses the power of a distributed ledger, working to give every person, organization, and thing the ability to own and control their own permanent digital identity.
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