Fujitsu today announced that it has developed a digital identity exchange technology that makes it possible for individual users and service businesses involved in online transactions to confirm the identity of other parties in transactions. 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 Fujitsu’s new identity exchange technology, evaluations (e.g. reputation and rating) for each user in a transaction are recorded as a series of transaction data. By storing these evaluations on the unfalsifiable distributed ledger of a blockchain, this system improvesthe reliability of insights into the trustworthiness about each user.
The digital identity exchange technology converts the trustworthy transaction data about individuals shared on the blockchain into a graph structure so that the relationships between users can be understood. 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.v Users can have their credentials verified with only a partial disclosure of relevant data, allowing for safe and highly-reliable transactions without forcing users to offer unnecessary personal details.
The newly developed technology analyzes the trust relationships of each user, allowing the system to preemptively determine the trustworthiness of the other party in a transaction. The newly developed technology allows users to easily confirm information about which companies and individuals can be trusted in transactions in a variety of digital business situations, helping to build a digital ecosystem that transcends the boundaries of companies and industries and makes safe and secure online transactions a reality for all.
