Identity?
- You want to use some online service... you put your email and a password... that's stored in some database..
- Now every time you want to access the service you put in the same thing and you get access ..
- That email and password combination stored in a company's database is your identity for that service...
- That's the web2 world..
Where is the Problem?
- You don't own it...it's stored in some database
- It's centralized...if a company chooses to not allow you to use it you can't..
- There is no true logical association here...it's just a company storing the credentials and allows you to use the service if they want...(they may deny even if you have correct credentials..)
How cryptography solves this?
- Here we don't put trust in some third party company but we put trust in code + math...
- We have two keys : One public, One private
- Public key can be shared any where we want
- Private key is our source of identity...we keep it secret
- someone with private key can sign the content of a message and it can be verified with it's corresponding public key
- The whole trust lies in the maths and code...
- It's a permission-less system..
DE
Source
This article was originally published by DEV Community and written by Sujal.
Read original article on DEV Community