With a greater emphasis on online interactions and digital business, identity management has become a critical global challenge worldwide. Physical credential documents can be easily tampered with; there is no way to separate the real from the fake.
Moreover, verifying the authenticity of digital identity has also become difficult. People have become adept at making fake certificates or altering PDFs to create fake IDs.
The lack of ability to differentiate between what’s real and what’s not can expose organizations to significant liabilities and risk, particularly when it comes to complying with stated industry rules and government regulations.
However, fret not because that’s where the verifiable credentials flow comes into the picture. According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), “Verifiable credentials represent statements made by an issuer in a tamper-evident and privacy-respecting manner.” Verifiable credentials are the cryptographically secured, tamper-proof counterpart of paper-based and digital credentials that individuals and organizations can present for quick, hassle-free identity verification.
Together with the Distributed Ledger Technology, also popularly known as Blockchain Technology, and Decentralized Identifiers protocol, verifiable credentials put organizations one step ahead in making identity proofing and decentralized identity and access management a reality.
Let’s explore more.
Understanding Verifiable Credentials
Verifiable Credentials digitally verify the holder’s identity without calingl upon the issuer.
They digitally watermark claims data through a robust combinatioxn of privacy-preserving and public key cryptography techniques so that holders of such credentials can verify their identity without exposing personally identifiable information (PII).
This is known as the decentralized approach to maintaining identity standards that upholds the three critical principles of identity management: assurance, pseudonymity, and privacy.
Gartner predicts that by 2024, a truly global, portable, decentralized identity standard will emerge in the market to address business, personal, social and societal and identity-invisible use cases.
The Benefits
- Quick and easy verification within seconds, therefore exponentially faster compared to the days or weeks spent using the traditional route.
- Eliminates the need to contact the issuer, i.e., any government department, certifying authority, or university, to verify the authenticity.
- Provides holders autonomy over their own data facilitated by the use of public key cryptography and decentralized identifiers. Additionally, verifiable credentials ensure privacy by allowing holders to choose parts of their identity they want to reveal.
- Secures utmost trust and faith amongst the three parties, i.e., the identity issuer, the identity holder, and the identity verifier.
- Tamper-proof and portable in digital wallets.
The Role of the Blockchain Business in Verifiable Credentials
As discussed above, verifiable credentials leverage decentralized identifiers or DIDs. DIDs are unique identifiers made up of a series of numbers and letters stored on the blockchain network, along with the issuer’s public key.
When you want to verify someone’s identity, they can simply leverage the blockchain business to eliminate the need to contact the issuer.
But what is blockchain technology?
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), known as blockchain technology in common parlance, is a system of recording information as a shared distributed database that is almost impossible to hack, cheat, or tamper with.
Since each block on the network has data that references the previous block, there is no way a potential hacker can tamper with one block or manipulate every node (computers) on the chain.
In short, the blocks are immutable. The blockchain business provides a single source of truth to all those on the network, identifying which credentials are valid and who authenticated them.
Additionally, blockchain development allows zero-knowledge proofs, enabling the verification of credentials without the holder revealing the actual data like name, date of birth, and residential address.
How can Acuvate help?
At Acuvate, we help clients automate and modernize business operations with AI-based solutions to common and pressing business challenges, thus enhancing productivity, efficiency, and business ROI.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we leverage new-age technologies like IoT, blockchain, advanced analytics, data modernization, and cloud computing to transform businesses across the globe.
Using blockchain technology, we empower clients to build secure, verifiable credentials to automate and streamline the entire identity management, verification, and certification process. Our solutions enable stronger collaboration, and data-informed business decisions, ensuring compliance and allowing significant time and cost-saving.
Interested to know more about Blockchain & verifiable credentials?
Schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.
