
Explore how external entities attest to our identities and how decentralized identity solutions grant control over personal data. Understand the risks of identity theft, surveillance, and loss of control.
Anyone with a basic understanding of IT systems can benefit from this course on decentralized identity systems using blockchains, including techies, investors, and business students.
Learn how attestations present evidence to substantiate identity attributes, such as name or age, with government documents or endorsements, and compare social attestations like LinkedIn recommendations to trusted validations.
Explore digital identity systems as frameworks that manage, authenticate, and verify identities across online platforms, acting as databases and single sources of truth for individuals.
Explain centralized, decentralized, federated, and emerging digital identity systems, including government and corporate identifiers, self-sovereign and blockchain-based identities, decentralized identifiers, and W3C verifiable credentials, plus privacy concerns from federated logins.
Explore why digital identity matters now by examining privacy risks and data collection practices. Highlight the role of centralized systems and potential exclusion in identity verification.
Explore how the W3C standard for decentralized identifiers enables secure, interoperable, and universally usable identities across platforms by outlining method specifications and did document structures.
Explore the W3C verifiable credential data model and its components—verifiable credentials, claims, credentials schema, digital signatures and proofs—supporting secure, interoperable, privacy-preserving verifications in decentralized identities.
Welcome to the course 'Decentralized Identity Systems using Blockchains' where we begin a journey through the complexities of digital identity systems and introduce Decentralized Digital Identity solutions.
Our journey begins with building a solid foundation in the basics of identity systems, by understanding the critical features and properties that shape digital identities.
As we navigate the evolution of digital identity, we get into a timely conversation about why we need to discuss about digital identity now more than ever.
Then we delve into Decentralized Digital Identities. The course discusses the basic concepts such as Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs).
Then we spend some time understanding the role of blockchains in these identity systems.
We then will cover real-life implementations such as Decentralized Identity in Ethereum, polygonID, and a few other Decentralized Identity solutions.
However, no analysis is complete without acknowledging the limitations of current decentralized identification solutions. So, we will spend some time understanding the limitations and discussing how these limitations can be overcome.
Please note that this course does not cover any coding for Decentralized Identity systems. The primary goal of this course is to introduce the fundamentals of identity systems and how Decentralized Identity systems are solving some of the pressing issues in this sector.