Episode 054: 10‐08‐2024 Jumping the Decentralized Identity S Curve - GluuFederation/identerati-office-hours GitHub Wiki
Title: Jumping the Decentralized Identity S Curve
- Host: Mike Schwartz, Founder/CEO Gluu
- Guest: Tina Srivastava, Co-Founder, Badge
- Co-Host: Rew Islam, FIDO Alliance Co-Chair, Dashlane Director of Engineering and Innovation
Description
There are a lot of promises in the market around decentralized identities with enterprises beginning to embrace digital wallets, DIDs and VCs. But the challenge still exists for users moving to new or shared devices that they have not previously registered. How do we account for those scenarios – without bootstrapping trust based on another trusted device, token or password? This is the core challenge Dr. Tina Srivastava, Cofounder of privacy tech company Badge has been working on solving with a team of MIT cryptography PhDs at a privacy company called Badge. Dr. Srivastava is a serial cybersecurity entrepreneur and the former Chief Engineer at Raytheon. Dr. Srivastava is excited to discuss the blueprint for how identity vendors and enterprises can effectively jump the identity S curve.
Homework
• Liminal Report: The Market Opportunity for Reusable Identity and How to Get There, Feb-2022 pdf • Identiverse Video: Jumping the Identity S Curve Achieving Privacy Preserving Identity Verification and Federation While
Graphic from Episode
Takeaways
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Badge (https://badgeinc.com) uses a combination of biometric, knowlege and contextual authentication factors to enable the local device to derive a key pair and certificate for authentication. This certificate can be used for any X.509 authentication workflow.
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Badge has has excellent accessibility properties, supporting even shared workstations at a call center, or a shared device used by all family members. One has to wonder if this technology would be useful for national identity projects whose biggest challenge is uniquely identifying a human.
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The decentralization lies in the idea that without the biometric inputs, none of the data is correlatable to a human. So the secrets are decentralized, not the platform--the badge server itself may be a hosted SaaS or self-hosted.
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Biometric authentication is a moving target. AI is getting better at tricking systems designed to identify humans. Companies like Badge will need to continually innovate to stay ahead of that curve.