Decentralized Identity: IPFS & ION

Identity is a critical part of how we all interact with each other every day, sometimes every moment of every day. Sometimes in every exciting moment we do the “forgot your password?” dance again. Regardless, establishing a path forward for user-controlled online identities is a table stakes requirement for the success of the dweb.

But, identity is hard. There are no easy solutions for interoperable, decentralized digital assertions of self. Privacy, security, validity, access control, surveillance, GDPR, KYC, anonymity. It’s like Inception, but each nested dream level is the same minefield littered with projects tilting at the windmills of identity for nothing but vinyl stickers slowly being covered by our laptops.

Hope has not abandoned the field. The Decentralized Identity Foundation has been overcoming this challenge for years, as have organizations like Reboot the Web of Trust. And there have been efforts to build decentralized identity systems on top of IPFS, such as IPID, Nomios.io, IPFS IDM, and most recently Ceramic Network.

However, today we are celebrating the launch of a decentralized identity protocol and service from an unlikely place: Microsoft.

Microsoft has been increasingly present in open source tools and services over the past few years, and has now launched a standards-based decentralized identity service, ION.

ION has been in development for over a year and is an implementation of Sidetree, a blockchain-agnostic distributed PKI protocol, that runs on the Bitcoin blockchain.

And store transaction data on IPFS.

Like HTTP, IPFS does not have user identity built into the protocol. However, IPFS provides resilience, validation, and future-proofing that HTTP cannot:

The ION implementation is written in JavaScript (TypeScript specifically), so it made sense for them to use js-ipfs as a Node.js service. ION aggregates a batch of identity transactions, publishes them via its IPFS node, and then writes the addresses (CIDs) for that batch to the Bitcoin blockchain.

To meet Microsoft's needs for using js-ipfs as a long-running process, we added cancelable requests to all APIs to ensure that as requests are made and processed, the underlying objects, memory, file handles, and other resources created and down the stack are properly cleaned up. Many thanks to Alex Potsides (@achingbrain) for implementing this long-requested feature, which is available in js-ipfs 0.44.0.

For a developer this would look like a function that can set a timeout on a per-request basis:

This is a public beta version of ION, now running live on the Bitcoin blockchain.

At the launch event, Daniel Buchner, head of Microsoft’s ION project, explained how to run nodes and use decentralized identities in today’s applications and services.

The project is open source, built on open standards, and you can run your own node - so try it out or contribute to the project today!