Does Self-Sovereign Identity Imply Decentralized Identity?
This presentation will demonstrate that human accountability via x.509 digital identity certificates is at the core of any real solution to phishing, software supply chain contamination, botnets, AI-agent driven fraud, breaches, etc. Identity certificates imply a certification authority, which raises legitimate concerns in the decentralized identity community. However, if any of us is to trust the identity claims of another person, we must both agree on an authority ’s attestation that the identity claims are valid. And so, the point is not to dispense with authority, but to do it right. That calls for a “license plate” identity which, like your car’s license plate, makes you accountable on the public (information) highway, but which does not disclose your identity; a protocol that makes it impossible to directly discern identity from “license plate” information; an identity certification authority database with no identity information in it, so that if a dictator demands at gunpoint the identity of the person who’s been critical of his regime, no sysadmin or d atabase administrator has any way of providing that information; a certification authority using “optimocracy governance,” where any certificate holder may participate in its governance; a recourse system by which an injured party (fraud, defamation, other injury) obtains a court order deemed legitimate by the member’ s attestation officer and may cause the disclosure of an identity if they and the management of the council of attestation officers deems the court order to represent a valid reason for disclosure of identity.
Saturday 2100 Grand Ballroom