Self-sovereign identity (SSI) is a term used to describe the digital movement that recognizes an individual should own and control their identity without the intervening administrative authorities. 

SSI allows people to interact within the digital world with the same freedom and capacity for trust as they do in their offline world. Everyone (including businesses and IoT) has different relationships or unique sets of identifying information. This information might be things like your birth date, citizenship, university degrees, or business licenses. In the physical world, these items are represented as cards or certificates that are held by the identity holder in a wallet or in a safe place. These items are presented when the individual has to prove their identity or something about their identity. Self-sovereign identity (SSI) brings identical freedoms and private autonomy to the web with a safe and trustworthy system of identity management.

SSI means the individual (or organization) manages their identity and controls access to those credentials– digitally. With SSI, the ability to regulate personal data resides with the individual, and not a governing third party granting or tracking access to those credentials. The SSI identity system gives you the flexibility to use your digital wallet and authenticate your own identity using the credentials you have received. You will no longer have to provide non-public information to dozens of databases whenever you would like to access new goods and services, thereby increasing the chance that hackers will steal your identity. This model of identity management is called “self-sovereign” identity because every individual is now in control of their own identity—they are their own sovereign nation. People can control their personal information and status. A person’s digital existence is now independent of any organization: no-one can take their identity away.

Promiscuous sharing of identity attributes has long been a primary weakness in identity management. BizSecure is built to support the use of sharing as little information as possible to give each identity holder the ability to control and secure their personal information. This is called minimal disclosure.

BizSecure’s minimal disclosure is enabled through a cryptographic technique called zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP). Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) are cryptographic techniques that allow users to share information without relinquishing their security and privacy. ZKPs use cryptography to prove a statement from party A (known as a prover) to party B (known as a verifier) without revealing anything else.

Using zero-knowledge proofs, BizSecure allows a person to prove things about themselves, based on verifiable claims, without having to reveal the claim itself. An example would be someone proving that they can unlock a 4-digit combination lock without providing the four numbers that they used.

Blockchain provides trust based on mathematics, on cryptology, in that you can be virtually 100% sure that the record added to the chain is verified and immutable. SSI leverages this ability of Blockchain to ensure that credentials are issued by trusted institutions and that those credentials have not been modified.