The context
The ISO TR 23249 "Overview of existing DLT systems for identity management" is a technical report from ISO/TC 307/JWG4 describing current initiatives, frameworks, and approaches to identity management through distributed ledger systems.
I acted as a Project Leader for this document, whose drafting started in November 2019 and it's available as an official ISO standard as of May 2022. The Project Leader coordinates the activities of the experts, integrates their contributions into the main document, and manages the meetings when the document is consolidated through a consensus process.
Paolo Campegiani, Bit4id
The challenges
Distributed ledger technology (DLT) could provide decentralized identity management, an innovative approach offering more privacy for the users, more data control, and generally a user-centric approach to managing identity data and attributes. This field is relatively new and, as it happens very often within the field of DLT, it's more a bottom-up approach than a coordinated effort. As such, many different ways to do things are still being experimented within the open market, and this could result in interoperability problems. This standardisation activity is geared toward providing a reasonably complete view of what people are doing within this field, so even radically different approaches could be further analysed in the following standardisation phases.
How standardisation activities help face the challenges
This Technical Report describes different initiatives, approaches, and frameworks currently adopted around the world. A Technical Report is a description, point in time, of what the community of experts behind it deemed as relevant. It helps contribute to the awareness of the different approaches, which could be even fundamentally different as there is not a standard to implement, by understanding how different solutions were designed and implemented. A party interested in implementing a decentralized identity system could read the Technical Report to see what others are doing.
The Benefits
Decentralised identity systems are not yet widely implemented as there are some concerns in terms of their scalability, sustainability, and interoperability. A standard tackling on some of these aspects and providing a common vocabulary or a reference architecture could contribute significantly towards the adoption phase.
Future plans
After the Technical Report, ISO/TC 307/JWG4 has decided to move on along the standardisation path for decentralized identity systems.