One important function of any government is keeping track of citizens, specifically making certain people can prove they are whom they say they are. Eyeing a new solution for this, the Illinois Blockchain Initiative, a consortium of state and county agencies working with financial blockchain technology focused groups, announced Thursday a birth registration digitization project in conjunction with Evernym Inc.

The project builds on work by the W3C’s Verifiable Claims Task Force using the Sovrin Foundation distributed identity ledger technology to create a secure, “self-sovereign” identity for Illinois citizens during the birth registration process. Evernym is a solution provider for distributed ledger technology, or blockchain technology, that produces platforms that use blockchains to store and protect critical information.

“Government has an important role to play in the development of any digital identity ecosystem,” said  Jennifer O’Rourke, blockchain business liaison for the Illinois Blockchain Initiative. “Identity is not only foundational to nearly every government service but is the basis for trust and legitimacy in the public sector.”

Under this initiative, Evernym would build a blockchain network to be used by state- and county-level agencies to certify certain personal identifying factors at birth registration. This information would be cryptographically signed and stored along with metadata such as name, date of birth, sex and blood type to create what are called “verifiable claims” or attributes.

The role of the blockchain technology is to provide a tamperproof record of the attributes and store them in a fashion that is protected by cryptographic privacy keys. The information will be stored in such a way that it can only be accessed and verified with the explicit consent of the identity holder via cryptographic keys or, in the case of a newborn child, the parents.

The system will also allow the government to answer petitions from outside agencies by supplying verification using the same cryptographic elements for verification of a person’s identity. Using blockchain technology, the government can give access only to verification of these “verifiable claims” without unlocking any more information than necessary.

Digital identity market emerges

“This architecture allows us to bridge the best of both worlds, combining government’s robust infrastructure for identity verification with a platform engineered for the digital identity ecosystem,” said Cab Morris of the Illinois Blockchain Initiative. “This digital identity system is extensible, interoperable and at the same time ensures the utmost security, privacy and user-agency. Additionally, this model for digital identity can extend beyond the boundaries of government and has broad applicability for many products and services in the private sector.”

Digital identity management has become the purview of many blockchain projects over the past two years as the technology promises to aid in both making a trustworthy, tamperproof audit log of records and at the same time protect the proprietary nature of sensitive information.

In July 2016, digital identity startup Netki Inc. raised $3.5 million in seed funding to explore blockchain identity management services to make it easier for digital currency holders. In June, Microsoft Corp. partnered with management consulting firm Accenture PLC to build a blockchain digital identity network that was presented at the United Nations. This month, blockchain identity firm ShoCard Inc. raised $4 million in venture capital to build out its enterprise identity solution ShoBage designed to allow large businesses to verify and manage employees.

These three examples represent only a small segment of the blockchain digital identity market that has been rapidly expanding in 2017. In February, Elena Mesropyan at Let’s Talk Payments identified more than 21 companies building out identity platforms.

A formal announcement on the partnership between Evernym and the Illinois Blockchain Initiative was to be made today by Evernym’s Chief Trust Officer Drummond Reed at the MyData2017 Conference in Helsinki, Finland. “Digitizing these foundational documents in a state the size and importance of Illinois will make a major contribution to the larger effort of solving the online identity problem,” said Reed.

Reed went on to say that such a transition will require starting with documents such as birth certificates due to their connected nature to verifiable identity. In fact, in many cases, a birth certificate is needed to get other identity documents, which can exist in a tangled web of government bureaucracy.

With this partnership, Evernym and the State of Illinois hope to explore how a private, distributed network for identity documents could make it easier for both government agencies and citizens to manage and access services.

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