Integrating Digital Identity and Blockchain

Blockchain is a recent technology whose importance is rapidly growing. One of its native features is pseudo-anonymity, since users are referred by (blockchain) addresses, which are hashed public keys with no link to real identities. However, when moving from the use of blockchain as simple platform for cryptocurrencies to applications in which we want to automatize trust and transparency, in general, there is not the need of anonymity. Indeed, there are situations in which secure accountability, trust and transparency should coexist (e.g., in supply-chain management) to accomplish the goal of the application to design. Blockchain may appear little suitable for these cases, due to its pseudo-anonymity feature, so that an important research problem is to understand how to overcome this drawback. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a solution that mixes the mechanism of public digital identity with blockchain via Identity-Based-Encryption. We define the solution and show its application to a real-life case study.