The KILT team has completed all milestones of the Polkadot Treasury Grant for developing the Decentralized Identity Provider (DIP), and DIP is now ready for use.
Using DIP, any chain can become “an identity provider, and any parachain (and, in the future, external chains) can integrate KILT and / or other identity providers for their identity needs.”
The Decentralized Identity Provider (DIP) enables “a cross-chain decentralized identity system inspired by the functionality of OpenID.”
This means that parachains requiring “an identity solution don’t need to build their own infrastructure.”
Instead, they can leverage “the infrastructure DIP provides.”
DIP is open-source, and you can integrate it “with existing Polkadot-compatible runtimes with minimal changes and without affecting the fee model of the relying party.”
DIP Actors
DIP reportedly has three key roles: the identity provider, the relying party or consumer, and the user.
The identity provider is any blockchain “with an identity system that makes it available for other chains, e.g., KILT Protocol, Litentry, etc.”
The relying party or “consumer” is any blockchain that has chosen “to delegate identity management to the provider, thus relieving it of needing to maintain its identity infrastructure.”
The user is an entity with an identity “on the provider chain and wants to use it on other chains without setting up a new identity on each.”
The process begins with a user “setting up their identity on an identity provider chain, for instance, KILT, by making a transaction.”
Once an identity completes that transaction, they “can share that identity with any relying party chain that uses that provider, eliminating the need for further interaction with the identity provider unless changes are made to the user’s identity information.”
Relying parties (e.g., parachains) can choose “one or more identity providers.”
As in the case of accepting multiple social logins “such as Google and Facebook, this allows them to access the information graph that each identity provider has previously built.”
The Tech
DIP provides a suite of components available for integration:
- A set of pallets for deployment on any chain that wants to act as an identity provider. These allow accounts on the consumer chain to commit identity information, storing such representation in the provider chain’s state.
- A set of pallets to deploy on any chain that wants to act as an identity-relaying or consumer party. These take care of validating cross-chain identity proofs provided by the subject and dispatch the actual call once the proof is verified.
- A set of support crates, suitable for use within a chain runtime, for types and traits the provider and relying partys can use.
These components enable the “use of state proofs for information sharing between chains.”
Identity on KILT is built around W3C-standard decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials.
Using KILT as an example, the following is “a streamlined version of the process for using DIP:”
Now that DIP is up and running, in the next stages, the team will “continue to refine privacy-preserving ways to make KILT credentials available to blockchain runtimes.”
These will include improvements “in proof size and proof verification efficiency and support for on-chain credential verification (or representation thereof).”
With DIP in the hands of the community, DIP’s users and community will guide future development.
As noted in the update, KILT is an identity blockchain “for generating decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and verifiable credentials, enabling secure, practical identity solutions for enterprises and consumers.”
KILT says that it brings the traditional process of trust “in real-world credentials (passport, driver’s license) to the digital world while keeping data private and in possession of its owner.”
