Protection Guidelines for Blockchain Based Digital Identity

Digital identity provides mechanisms for personally identifying information (PII) to be asserted and verified in digital services and transactions. To utilize the full potential of digital identity in to enable personalized services and efficient transactions, blockchain technology is being proposed as the means to achieve the holy grail. While it certainly has promise, the growing number of threats on the blockchain ecosystem and the traditional identity management system call for a systematic approach towards securing the identity management based on blockchains. We study the existing attacks and the known vulnerabilities and the possible hypothetical attacks which might get executed via these vulnerabilities. We analyze these attack scenarios with respect to the attacker's costs and benefits and the defender's mitigation costs and damages. Finally, we propose design considerations for the architects towards securing their implementation of the blockchain based digital identity systems.