IDunion is a new European decentralised identity management platform that is promising to bring user centric digital identity with privacy at its core. In this podcast we had Adrian Doerk – Product manager at Lissi and communication & Public relations at IDunion, walk us through IDunion.

 
What is blockchain?
For Adrian, blockchain is just a data structure. When you expand its definition from a DLT (distributed ledger technology) perspective with multiple nodes on a network what makes it interesting is whether the rights to writing on the network are permissioned or permissionless. This is determined by the type of consensus that exists on the network who determines who and what is written into the network.

 
Present challenges with digital identity
History of the digital identity on the internet:

* Isolated siloed identity where users would login and authenticate themselves with the provider of a digital identity for accessing a service
* Federate identity where multiple companies and institutions got together and agreed on a single sign on for multiple sites. However, the challenges of this model is that the identity was still focused on a central operator and not all companies and institutions where comfortable with this approach
* User centric identity where a classic example is login with Google login or Facebook login. Whilst this is very convenient for the user it does lock up the user in a proprietary ecosystem which is very dangerous since these providers live from user and behavioural data which they resell to third parties.

The next generation of digital identity will be designed with privacy by design principles. It will be a user centric proposition that is both convenient but also gives the user more control around their identity for authentication and identification purposes.

* Identification asks: who are you?
* Authentication asks: is it you again?

 
IDunion vision
IDunion is a consortia, whose aim is to build an open ecosystem for self sovereign identities controlled by its user. Whilst the platform can be used everywhere it is based on European values, laws and regulations.

Everyone (including natural as well as legal persons and things) has the possibility to manage their identity information by themselves and to decide when they want to share this information with whom. The sovereignty over one’s own data is tremendously important, especially when it comes to very sensitive and personal information.

Users can choose one of several wallets, which are used for storing and presenting credentials to third parties as required. This is helpful for a wide range of use-cases and enables a new way of identity management. Thus, technology companies are no longer acting as a central identity manager, but the user himself! The user can decide where the information can be seen, which program is used to manage information and with whom this information is shared. We call this concept the self-sovereign identity.

 
IDunion platform
Source: IDunion

IDunion uses Hyperledger as a kind of technical umbrella for their multiple implementations:

* Hyperledger Indy for the implementation of the network
* Hyperledger Aries for the agents which communication with the network
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