According to foreign media reports, IBM recently joined a non-profit organization named Sovrin Foundation, which aims to build a global distributed identity system based on blockchain technology.
In an interview, Phil Windley, chairman of the Sovrin Foundation, said that IBM will join the non-profit organization as a "founder" to provide hardware, security, and networking capabilities to digital users throughout the world. .
The Sovrin Foundation also said that under the leadership of Telekom Innovation Labs, a research of Deutsche Telekom, many international IT companies have also joined the organization.
“We live and work on the Internet in a completely different way from the real world,” Winli said. “By creating a global digital identity system, the Sovrin Foundation is working to make the online world as interactive as the real world.”
The Sovrin Foundation's identity network uses a distributed technology, blockchain, to implement the secure exchange of cryptographically signed vouchers to prove the owner's digital identity information.
"We believe that adopting a blockchain is a new model that allows individuals and organizations to securely share private information and credentials without the need of a middleman." said IBM Blockchain Manager Marie Wieck.
IBM has been actively participating in the blockchain project and has not carried out accounting of related costs. It is reported that the company is keen to keep itself at the forefront in blockchain development.
Winley said that the current operating capacity of the Sovrin network is limited, but by the middle of 2018 will be more popular.
The Sovrin Foundation believes that the existing identity system is flawed, and over 2.9 billion personal information were leaked in 2017.
"These destructive and costly security breaches are the result of the development of the Internet without a real identity layer," said the Sovrin Foundation.
"To solve this infrastructure, the purpose of the Sovrin network is to add the missing identity layer to the Internet."
The current Sovrin network is based on the emerging standards of the WWW Consortium, which standardizes the format of digital signature vouchers.