Existing blockchain implementations do not include features required for an effective, decentralized and scalable identity management solution. Although current public (permissionless) blockchains provide rigorous, self-incentivizing primitives to ensure the integrity, availability, and non-repudiation of events, they often intentionally eschew confidentiality features as anathema to the consensus goals of traditional proofs of work. Fortunately, we believe that distributed autonomous contracts or organizations (DAOs), as seen in the Ethereum ecosystem, provide opportunity to enable confidentiality and selective disclosure primitives without compromises to core blockchain protocol or incentive structures. Our research, FEUDAL, seeks to answer questions and overcome obstacles necessary to achieve everything required for tomorrows identity management solution built on a permissionless blockchain: confidentiality (with selective information disclosure), integrity, availability, non-repudiation, provenance and pseudo-anonymity. FEUDAL will define and implement Federated Identity 2.0: permissioned authentication and authorization built on a permissionless, public blockchain. Our Federated Identity 2.0 concept garners benefits of the blockchain infrastructure (availability, integrity), adds additional features (confidentiality,permissioned attribute authorship, administrative delegation) while remaining interoperable with industry-standard data exchange formats such as SAML and LDAP. FEUDAL will provide a clear path toward better identity management while remaining backwards compatible with traditional federated schemes. The applications for such a DAO-based technology are far-reaching in both Government and Industry. Commercial applications include, but are not limited to: scalable single sign on between federated entities, tracking credit worthiness via selective disclosure of attributes to approved creditors, and information escrow governed by autonomous contracts.
