Data Sharing for common data interfaces into various systems Team Zeppelin
Digital identity management has become an area of increasing concern in the light of recent events regarding data breach. Uncontrolled access to sensitive data has grave consequences, which leaves users vulnerable to privacy invasion and information misuse. Personal information is often shared without awareness and becomes susceptible to unauthorized access. These problems call for an innovative and creative technology for a solution.
Blockchains, due to their inherent structure, provide us with a resilient and immutable ledger capable of conducting millions of transactions without comprising on throughput. Blockchain makes use of cryptographic hash functions like the SHA family. The distributed and encrypted nature of blockchains makes tampering with the blocks comprised within the block-chain extremely challenging. Using Blockchain allows us to harness the computing power from computers all around the world in a trusted and robust manner.
We propose a system that allows organizations to access customer data in a safe and secure way, under respective users’ authorization. The system prioritizes the users’ privacy, while allowing Data Consumers to gain access to required data on a need-to-know basis. The system focuses on selective access to only the required user credentials, which allows users to have complete control over their digital identity. The user controls who gets to access what information.
Our system architecture comprises of two blockchains, one for tracking the consumer requests and one for hosting user credentials metadata. Ethereum is a decentralized platform for applications that run exactly as programmed without any chance of fraud, censorship or third-party interference. Since writing to the Ethereum blockchain is heavy and expensive for high volume of data, it makes storing user credential documents on IPFS an attractive alternative. InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol and network designed to create a content-addressable, peer-to-peer method of storing and sharing hypermedia in a distributed file system. While Ethereum allows us to store transaction history and user credential metadata, IPFS takes care of storing and distributing the authorized user credentials. IPFS uses peer to peer technology which supported by enough nodes, can easily outperform traditional client server architectures, and allows file transfer even over low bandwidth. Since IPFS stores the user credential document, the data consumer need not store a copy of the same content on their database, which allows us to keep data redundancy in check.
Our application has the ability to connect two organizations operating in a ‘trustless’ environment. Thus our system acts as a ‘trust mediator’ between two transacting parties ensuring data security and availability at the same time. Thus, our proposal provides a practical solution for the existing problems in digital identity management and leaves scope for future development as well.