The subject of this review is Microsoft’s “Decentralized Identity” paper. Although, it’s pretty limited in its technical exposure of (citing) “how to build an open, trustworthy, interoperable, and standards-based Decentralized Identity (DID) solution for individuals and organizations”, still I’ll venture to apply “System: Security- Velocity- Engineering- Transparency” sub-rating to it.
You can always bet that Microsoft will never object to you choosing any platform you want providing this platform belongs to Microsoft. DID is not an exception. Microsoft, of course, wants you to own your personal identity only leaving to itself where this identity is stored, how this identity will be verified and to whom it will then be sold. Result: “c” for “Transparency”.
From sketchy and vague proposed architecture exposition available in this piece we can deduce that Microsoft wants to create a platform on which different “identities management” apps can then be built. The platform will sanction “DID-signed attestations” and “enable identity owners to generate, present, and verify claims”. The main Microsoft idea is to allow users to create, store and change their data in their personal “Identity Hubs” and to keep in blockchain (it can be any of them) only hashes of metadata pointers.
The proposed solution, which allows users to freely update their identity but permits them to exchange their DID only after “attestation”, sounds interesting although not necessarily original (“b” for “Engineering”). However, it leaves doors wide open for all types of attacks directed against the “attestation” consensus as well as the “Identity Hubs” (“c+” for “Security” with “+” as a bonus for the Microsoft’s significant practical experience in those matters). Besides, depending on the concrete countries’ jurisdiction those “attestations” have to differ, which greatly undermines the universality and scalability of the proposed protocol (“c++” for “Velocity” with “++” for Microsoft’s very large users base).
RESULT: System: Security- Velocity- Engineering- Transparency: c+c++bc
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