TrustID, Telefónica's new project that will be under the supervision of Hyperledger Labs, is focused on ensuring the decentralization of identity management in the different blockchain networks.
At the beginning of the month the Spanish multinational telecommunications company Telefonica S.A., announced the launch of its new decentralized identity solution TrustID. The objective is to provide a feasible solution based on blockchain for the decentralized management of the identities of the company's users. Telefónica announced that its new identity project is under the tutelage of one of the most important organizations for innovation and development of blockchain-based ideas in the world. Linux Foundation, Hyperledger Labs, also noted that TrustID will operate under a license open source as an independent project within the Hyperledger ecosystem.
Through this organization, Telefónica hopes that the open source community will potentially contribute to the development and evolution of the TrustID project, in order to develop a new standard that simplifies identity management within blockchain networks regardless of the underlying technology behind these networks.
Telefónica also announced that TrustID is part of its project TrustOS, a solution developed with the aim of simplifying and facilitating the connection of companies' business processes with blockchain technology. Thus, among the components of the TrustOS project is the new solution for the management of decentralized identities.
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Telefónica seeks decentralization of corporate identities
The TrustID project was born as a solution to the problem faced by enterprise blockchains when interacting with other organizations through their different infrastructures. This problem occurs in Hyperledger Fabric environments that lack decentralized identities, one of the key components for decentralization in enterprise environments.
The company explains that Hyperledger Fabric uses X.509 certificates to authenticate each of the organizations and the members that belong to it. Although the issuance of these certificates allows the identification and verification of the authenticity of a member or user, something that is very positive for the business sector, it is also a limitation when any of these members of a network needs to interact with another organization other than the one to which it belongs.
CA certificates grant a user proper authorization to interact with the network, but when that user needs to interact with another network, the certificates granted are not valid for an organization other than the one for which they were issued.
“If user A possesses a valid certificate issued by Org1, then they can interact with the network through Org1’s peers, or at least through entities that know how to validate their “chain of trust.” However, if user A wishes to interact with the network through an Org2 Fabric application, then Org2’s peers will not be able to identify whether A is a valid user on the network.”
Because of this, TrustID was born as a solution that will allow the decentralization of the Hyperledger Fabric identity, defining the user's identity in a decentralized way so that they can interact and relate without problems with any of the applications implemented in other networks.
Hyperledger Labs, the cradle for the development of TrustID
Telefónica assured that the interest that Hyperledger has shown in the development of this project was what motivated them to release the code and transfer TrustID to the Hyperledger ecosystem. For the company, there is nothing better than sharing this vision with other members of the community, and that everyone can contribute to the development and evolution of the project until it becomes a real solution that allows interaction with any network, no matter if they are based on Hyperledger or on other blockchains such as Ethereum.
The development plans for the TrustID project will begin with implementation within Hyperledger Fabric, and will then progress to developing mechanisms that allow interoperability between the different networks. The idea is that the same credentials used by a user within Fabric environments can be used within other blockchains to manage different assets and Tokens.
Identity Chaincode will be one of the components of the project
TrustID will consist of two essential components: a SDK library for the management of identities in a unique way and a “identity chaincode" that will allow the interaction of identities with the different blockchains in a decentralized way. The chaincode It consists of a proxy server responsible for authenticating user identities and registrations, as well as routing calls in external chains and transactions authenticated in TrustID.
The chaincode also has a registry that stores and safeguards all the DID data of the users that allow access to the different networks; it also uses a service registry and an external registry that make it easier for the services with which the user wants to interact to be implemented on any channel.
In short, TrustID will allow interoperability between various networks to which users will be able to access using their same credentials, without having to change them. Through TrustID users will be able to access Bitcoin, to their Ethereum tokens or to Hyperledger networks with the same credentials.
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