Identity management

Identity management is a complicated, involved topic, especially in regulated industries where identities must be managed and have significant business consequences, such as around activities including Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering (AML), and other reporting and analytics functions:

• Permissioning is the concept of member enrollment certificates (eCerts) and transaction certificates for each member (tCerts); these enable an entity to be permissioned and identified while transactions are completed
• End user identity, which is maintained by a participating entity in the blockchain network, is the mapping of the LDAP/User registry to the tCerts or transaction ID for the sake of tracing (Know Your Customer, as well as Know Your Customer's Customer)

Other identity management considerations include:

• An LDAP or existing user registry won't go away and has to be considered as a design point, since there's typically been significant investment and security policies in place for mature authentication and authorization systems
• Trust systems are at the heart of blockchain technology and must pave the way for trust with identity insertion (for use cases that require transactional traceability)
• The identity on blockchain and for blockchain
• Identity acquisition, vetting, and life cycle
• Alignment with trust systems based on use cases