PhD candidate: Abylay Satybaldy, IDI
Main supervisor: Associate Prof. Mariusz Nowostawski, IDI/IE
Co-supervisors: AssociateProf. Bian Yang, IIK/IE
Aim of project
Rights and identity management play a central role in many application domains that utilize blockchain technology. It is central in Personal Data Management, Electronic Health records, or systems that interact with any public institution. The ideal solution will leverage trust inherent in blockchain to the application layer. Blockchains provide a promising operational environment for the trend of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), characterized by transformation from a non-user controlled centralized model to a fully user-controlled decentralized model. Self-sovereign identity management enables principals to prove validity of identities on the attribute level across identity issuers with little or no involvement from identity authorities, which provides a promising rights and identity proving methodology for applications deployed on blockchain.
The main objectives of this project are focused on research and development in the following areas:
(1) efficient and robust rights management with consensus across identity authorities and service providers, e.g., by exploiting the functionality of smart contracts;
(2) methods for privacy-preserving proof of rights and identity attributes, e.g., by secure multi-party computation, homomorphic encryption, and zero-knowledge proofs;
(3) in-depth understanding of the real-life scenarios providing technical solutions to managing the trust links between off-chain and on-chain assets, with identities in various application scenarios.