Genuine Global Identities for Open e-Democracy

Hi All,

My team at Weizmann is engaged on basic research on the foundations of e-democracy.

For a foundational discussion see: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/8/229759-point/pdf For some of our work, see: https://arxiv.org/search/?query=Shapiro%2C+Ehud&searchtype=author&order=...

Here is a relevant abstract of a work-in-progress: A Global Web of Trust of Global Identities: Supporting an Open and Sybil-Resilient e-Democracy

A key threat to any open electronic community in general, and to an open e-democracy in particular, is fake identities, aka sybils: They undermine the integrity of the community, hamper equality, subvert accountability and are a potent source of manipulation and disinformation, thus promoting distrust. Critically, a swarm of sybils may attack an e-democracy in concert and overtake it. Genuine global identities are needed in a broad range of contexts, to increase credibility and accountability on the net ֿ( https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/PublicIdentity.html ) in general, and to enable democratic processes +( https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/8/229759-point/pdf ) in particular.

To help achieve that, we propose here a notion of a self-sovereign and decentralized global identity that consists of a public key and a profile, which may be cryptographically-hashed for privacy. People can create their own global identities and form a global web of trust among them. We explore the properties of global identities, their profiles and their global web of trust and outline their potential realization in compliance with the emerging standards of Decentralized Identity ( https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-spec/ ) (DID) and Verifiable Credentials ( https://www.w3.org/TR/verifiable-claims-data-model ) (VC) and with privacy-related regulation, in particular the EU GDPR.

Attached file: https://consultation.ngi.eu/sites/default/files/attachment/cacm-e-democr...