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Integrating Digital Identity and Blockchain

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On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems. OTM 2018 Conferences (OTM 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11229))

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Abstract

Blockchain is a recent technology whose importance is rapidly growing. One of its native features is pseudo-anonymity, since users are referred by (blockchain) addresses, which are hashed public keys with no link to real identities. However, when moving from the use of blockchain as simple platform for cryptocurrencies to applications in which we want to automatize trust and transparency, in general, there is not the need of anonymity. Indeed, there are situations in which secure accountability, trust and transparency should coexist (e.g., in supply-chain management) to accomplish the goal of the application to design. Blockchain may appear little suitable for these cases, due to its pseudo-anonymity feature, so that an important research problem is to understand how to overcome this drawback. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a solution that mixes the mechanism of public digital identity with blockchain via Identity-Based-Encryption. We define the solution and show its application to a real-life case study.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For the sake of presentation and to avoid to introduce new notations, in the following, with a little abuse of notation, we use the address \(A_u\) also to refer to the user u, thus meaning “the user associated with the address \(A_u\)”.

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Acknowledgment

This paper has been partially supported by the project “Id Service - Digital Identity and Service Accountability” funded by the Ministry of Economic Development (MISE), project code number F/050238/03/X32 and by INdAM – GNCS Project 2018 “Processing and analysis of Big Data modeled as graphs in different application contexts".

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Correspondence to Gianluca Lax .

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Buccafurri, F., Lax, G., Russo, A., Zunino, G. (2018). Integrating Digital Identity and Blockchain. In: Panetto, H., Debruyne, C., Proper, H., Ardagna, C., Roman, D., Meersman, R. (eds) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems. OTM 2018 Conferences. OTM 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11229. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02610-3_32

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02610-3_32

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-02610-3

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