Fujitsu Laboratories has unveiled what it calls “digital identity
exchange technology” aimed to increase the security of online
transactions.
The tech, based on blockchain, makes it possible for individuals and
businesses making online transactions to confirm the identity of other
parties involved. More importantly, the identification system gauges the
the “trustworthiness” of the other party’s credentials, the firm said
in a press release.
According to Fujitsu Labs:
“The rapid advance of digitalization in recent years has
been accompanied by a dramatic rise in the number of online transactions
in which users cannot see one another face to face, making it difficult
to judge the credibility of the other party and leading to heightened
concerns around trust. With reports of fraud and instances of people
falsifying personal credentials like work history and professional
qualifications growing increasingly prevalent, ensuring the circulation
of high-quality, reliable identification data poses an urgent challenge
to users and businesses alike.”
The new ID tech addresses this by mutually evaluating the parties in a
transaction and looking at past transaction data to analyse the
relationships between the parties, as well as others who have transacted
with them previously.
Effectively it determines a reputation and rating for each party and records these evaluations on a distributed ledger.
The firm explains:
“A trustworthiness score is attached to each user by
weighting factors including how many trusted users evaluate them highly.
Even if a user colludes with a third party to improperly raise their
evaluation, the graph-structured relationships will reveal information
such as the weakness of their relationships with other users, giving the
system the potential to identify misrepresentations.”
Fujitsu said the technology will enable more secure online services,
with the added advantage of “user-friendly” features such as graphics
that provide visualizations of the relationships between users.
The Japanese tech firm has been working on numerous blockchain projects in recent years, from providing the underlying tech for inter-bank settlement, to launching a “ready to go” blockchain service that it said could provide a minimum viable product in just five days.
It’s also developed tech aimed to spot problems with smart contracts on ethereum platforms.
source link
