CitizenKey is the first solution to solve the multi-dimensional identity problem
Identity is a particularly wicked problem that has been haunting everyone ever since the start of digitization.
In one end we have identity anarchy and massive crime and in the other end we find authoritarian regimes amassing around single national id, surveillance capitalism, these combining into digital feudalism where government power is abused to drive profit and surveillance to provided taxed and more surveillance power to government while identity theft, economic crimes and all sorts of data crimes are accelerating.
The solution to this is not simple.
When you start with the principle of one identity per purpose, you create the mechanism to contain context and share data within and for a particular purpose without enabling secondary data crimes.
This is what blinding using the open source library UProve can achieve and why CitizenKey is so evolutionary in its achievement of simultaneously enabling
- Trustworthy data sharing for services and research,
- Empowering citizens with contextual control to ensure rights and restore markets
- and countering the massive crime problems escalating in all directions.
The rest is then "only" about enabling and customizing identity for the multitude of secondary or compliance requirements.
But there are a lot of aspects when you get into the details.
Covering all the dimensions require a very carefully designed framework
- From UN Global Goal 16.9 ("Global Identity") over National Id 2.0 to Contextual Identity
- From IOT over infrastructure contextualization to supporting complex application requirements
- Handling all the complex stack issues from usability in one end to semantic integration in the other while retaining non-linkability
- Overcoming the myriad of bad technical standards designed to centralized control
- Enabling asymmetric upgrade, gradual change and support for continuous change
What is clear is what CitizenKey is NOT:
- CitizenKey is P2P and not a "trust-me" model where some man-in-the-middle accumulate control and profit
- CitizenKey use blinding-at-issuance to avoid key reuse and long-lived keys that require revocation and data retention
- CitizenKey make no use of blockchain and other cloud-based lock-in mechanisms
- CitizenKey only apply revocable biometrics such as privacy biometrics (on-card), biometric encryption (mixing biometric data with one-tie keys in zero-knowledge proofs or contextual existence. There are no collection of non-revocable biometrics at is would create a genocide database linking biometrics to identity opening for all the worst sinister abuses.