Accountable Digital Identity (ADI) — Trust Framework for Human Identities

In the last blog post, I presented a non-trivial use case where Verifiable Credentials can reduce process timelines and enhance digital transformation efforts for enterprises. I mentioned Accountable Digital Identity (ADI) as a framework for Trust and Accountability. So, what is it — a cat , dog or a cow? Lets say MeoWoofMoo and get to know more…

ADIA — Layered Model

A simple way of looking at ADIA would be understand foundational blocks that make up the privacy and data security and overlay that with economic models.

Why is this important? Well, simply because the world operates on pre-existing rules that have evolved over decades. The role of security and privacy frameworks is to enhance the consumer experience and not create impediments for businesses to conduct transactions. Questions ADIA addresses typically are:

1. How can you trust entities in the ecosystem?
2. What makes them trusted parties?
3. How are contracts and transactions negotiated in a transparent yet accountable manner?
4. How can we eliminate fraudulent actors in the system?

How is it done?

No problem can be solved simply by adding technology or adding checkpoints, they have to first make sense, and secondly implemented correctly.

ADIA has three parts:

1. Technology Specification: A draft version explaining the vision, components, and the operations that make up issuing Verifiable Credentials, verifying them and operating in a trusted framework. Read more here — https://adiassociation.github.io/ADIA-specification/ADIA-overview.html
2. Governance Specification: A draft version explaining policies and procedures to be a participant in the ecosystem, either an Issuer, Interchange, Directory operator and so on. Read more here — https://adiassociation.github.io/ADIA-specification/ADIA-spec-governance.html
3. Protocol Specification: A draft version explaining the message structures to communicate between participants in the ecosystem. Read more here — https://adiassociation.github.io/ADIA-specification/ADIA-protocol.html

How does the ecosystem look?

Resolving human identities to a unique individual is a complex problem. People have different personas in different systems of record. Add the complexity of legal jurisdictions and data in geographical boundaries, the problem grows by many fold. The technical and governance specification address these issues and provide interoperability to exchange Verifiable Credentials across independent networks.

In subsequent posts, I will go into details of entities but on a high level,

• ADIA Global Directory (AGD): One primary Root of Trust system with one or more distributed or delegated shared instances.
• ADIA Regional Directory (ARD): One or more Directory Services serving a scope, such as a geopolitical region or a country. Each directory serves to uniquely identify each participant via a Digital Address or a collection of attributes.
• Interchange: A composition of services providing foundational functionality such as Digital Address Service, Identity Escrow, Credential Broker, and Payment Broker for the entities in the ecosystem.

I hope this sets you on a path to understand why complex use cases like the one described in my mortgage process post requires a trust framework such as ADIA.