Digital ID

Note: This page is work-in-progress. May be entirely missing citations and major content sections.

Digital ID refers to a collection of recent approaches to solving the trust problem between 2 entities ( 2 persons, computing devices or services).

Digital ID aims to centralize and automate (biometric) authentication mechanisms more than existing systems, and to require that all business and government services trust and use these IDs and that these are the only way of establishing trust with users.

Background

Trust Problem

2 strangers do not automatically trust each other.

Could one imagine a stranger asking 'to borrow 50$' and him expecting one to trust him to return it? Although this is about money, sometimes a trust issue is about identity. Knock-knock jokes would not have 'become jokes' if it wasnt so easy to deceive with words.

Trust of identity is brokered through a previously-trusted 3rd party, in one form or another. Young children often are introduced to each other by a chain of trust of 3rd party entities --typically a parent or trusted friend.

Identification

To drive a car, a driver's licence (A physical object provided by a trusted 3rd party bearing that vouches for the person present) is required to be present on the person.

E-Commerce

2000-2019, E-commerce evolved to need trust established at multiple levels of protocol, from TLS certificates to Multi-factor authentication (more needed on MFA etc).
(more needed on history, developments, who are the primary sources and more.)

Centralization, Access Control

In the IT world, a computer workgroup has a problem: a known user is limited to (and trusted by) only the small few computers used to-date. This is one of the many scalability problems in IT is being able to add new computers without having to manually set up the account for that user. Directory Services software and protocols offer a centralized set-and-forget approach to storing a users account in a central database, against which devices added to the network can directly trust/authenticate.

The government and business world claim to see problems that parallel the workgroup model. For example it could appear to save a lot of administrative overhead if a new hospital was built nearby and could access individual files of the whole country, automatically. Another value claimed is that the entrance could be automated using facial-recognition (a biometric ID) and perhaps reduce wait-times and increase throughput.

Virtualization

To financially survive regional lockdown policies, many businesses made services accessible over the internet as much as possible. Examples are phone-apps with Fast food places. Slogans like 'skip the line' or 'order online, pickup in person', or 'curbside delivery' all which use some sort of phone-accessible ordering system.