Microsoft Corp. has introduced a new open-source decentralized network designed to use existing blockchains to verify and manage identity.

Called ION, for Identity Overlay Network, the network is based on the Sidetree protocol, a distributed public key infrastructure. It runs on top of the bitcoin blockchain.

Microsoft announced it was building a blockchain-based distributed identity or DID management platform in February 2018 and the release today is the culmination of that project.

Distributed identity management, in this case, is a way to provide digital identification through a secure distributed open-source network. While open to anyone, much of Microsoft’s pitch has been focused on proving identification to an estimated 1.1 billion people around the world who lack any legal form of ID.

“We believe every person needs a decentralized, digital identity they own and control, backed by self-owned identifiers that enable secure, privacy preserving interactions,” Alex Simons, corporate vice president programming management for Microsoft’s Identity Division, wrote in a blog post. “This self-owned identity must seamlessly integrate into their lives and put them at the center of everything they do in the digital world.”

Although ION works on top of the bitcoin blockchain initially, the ultimate aim of Microsoft is for ION to work with any blockchain independently.

For most users, ION would work as digital decentralized ID, negating the need for individual user names for social media, email services, cloud access and more. This would remove the control apps, services and organizations have over digital identifiers, returning ownership to the user.

In a way, it works in a similar fashion to using Facebook to log into a third-party site but with the user owning the identity data, not Facebook or the site being visited.

The implications, should ION be adopted, may be profound. Christopher Allen, a crypto veteran and co-founder of the World Wide Web Consortium, told CoinDesk that this could impact the entire tech industry.

“A lot of enterprise infrastructures use Microsoft products,” Allen said. “So if they integrate this into any of their infrastructure products, they’ll have access to DID.”

The first ION release is an “early preview release” with “rough edges and all,” but it could be the start of a revolution in online identity management.

Image: Pixabay