Digital identity
Digital identity

Summary/Abstract: Identifying a person in a society is an essential aspect of any functioning economy. The lack of effective ways to identify natural persons would make it impossible to establish relationships. The advent of the Internet has led to the need of adopting appropriate means of identification in the digital realm. Thus was born the idea of digital identity, a concept that has evolved over time from simple digital representations of real-world means of identification (eg, ID card scanning) to advanced methods of identification based on cryptography (eg, electronic signature). Recent technological advances consisting in the improvement of smartphones, the evolution of cryptography and the emergence of the blockchain have allowed the creation of a new framework for expressing digital identity, in the center of which is the user. This framework aims to change the current paradigm of "centralized" identity to a model of "decentralized" identity. Thus, new notions are outlined such as "decentralized" digital identity and even of a species of it, respectively the self-sovereign identity (SSI). This article explains these notions, as well as how they might work in the current European legislative context.

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