Decentralized, REST-ful Digital Identity
through Light-Weight Identity™ (LID™)
Johannes Ernst
NetMesh Inc.
http://netmesh.info/jernst

Abstract

Digital Identity technology already has more impact on our lives than virtually any other technology, as its focus is our very selves. This trend is only going to accelerate as digital identity technologies proliferate (perhaps towards a “Digital Identity Big Bang”) and as increasingly many islands of identity management are connected and correlated, with or without consent of the affected individual. Thus, it is paramount from a societal, social, poltical and technological perspective that as the community of thinkers and technologists, we get the basic parameters of a world-wide identity architecture right.

As many have pointed out, the Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture invented by Berners-Lee, Fielding and others may be the single most important reason why the internet as we know it today could be created so rapidly, and can serve the needs of so many different constituencies so well.

In our presentation, we will outline our core beliefs about what the societal requirements for an internet-scale identity architecture are, or will be once candidates for such an architecture and their properties become known more broadly by the general public (e.g. extreme simplicity, decentralized innovation, local control...). We will show how these requirements are a superset of the requirements that led to REST, and how only a fairly small extension to the REST protocols is sufficient to make the tremendously successful REST architecture identity-aware.

To illustrate our considerations, we will use Light-Weight Identity (LID), a decentralized, REST-ful digital identity protocol that not only meets the requirements as we have found them, but that is developing into a platform on which many parties (commercial, open source etc.) can innovate using the same models that have worked so well on the internet.