SBIR-STTR Award

Verifiable Claims and Fit-for-Purpose Decentralized Ledgers
Award last edited on: 1/12/2018

Sponsored Program
SBIR
Awarding Agency
DHS
Total Award Amount
$849,467
Award Phase
2
Solicitation Topic Code
H-SB016.1-002
Principal Investigator
Manushantha Sporny

Company Information

Digital Bazaar Inc

203 Roanoke Street W
Blacksburg, VA 24060
   (540) 961-4469
   support@digitalbazaar.com
   www.digitalbazaar.com
Location: Single
Congr. District: 09
County: Montgomery

Phase I

Contract Number: ----------
Start Date: ----    Completed: ----
Phase I year
2016
Phase I Amount
$99,512
A wide variety of applications could benefit from combining identity management technology with decentralized ledgers (aka blockchains). However, not every application uses the same data or requires the same consensus or authorization models. While a single solution is unlikely, we assert each application could benefit from a standard, configurable, decentralized ledger with flexible semantics. We will study the feasibility of this concept by building a proof-of-concept Linked Data ledger format and architecture. We intend to configure this architecture to demonstrate how to publish credentials (aka verifiable attributes) to address specific DHS use cases and to commercialize the created technology. The proposed architecture would enable ledgers to provide independently, cryptographically verifiable credentials with flexible semantics. This approach decouples issuing and verification services, reducing infrastructure requirements and costs for issuers. It also increases a ledger's utility and number of participants, resulting in cost sharing and increased incentives to provide the high availability now only required by the verification process. For example, fire and rescue organizations could publish credentials about personnel to a highly available public ledger. First responders could then be authenticated to gain access to protected sites or resources by demonstrating ownership over these credentials via their mobile device. Even if the credential issuers had experienced complete system failure, the verification process would be unaffected. This approach encourages shared infrastructure costs, highly available verification systems, and new forms of authentication and authorization for numerous applications, including those that would benefit the DHS.

Phase II

Contract Number: ----------
Start Date: ----    Completed: ----
Phase II year
2017
Phase II Amount
$749,955
Blockchain technology shows promise when applied to identity management ecosystems. However, current blockchain technology stacks have been designed and optimized such that they are tightly coupled to a specific application area. More often than not, they focus on the transfer of financial value, not identity management. If ledger technology is going to be used to solve a wide variety of problems, a more generalized, modular design for producing many different ledgers may be a better alternative to trying to solve many problems using the same ledger instance, such as Bitcoin. Digital Bazaar therefore proposes to build a blockchain technology stack that is capable of producing many instances of "fit for purpose" decentralized ledgers. During Phase I, Digital Bazaar created a proof-of-concept for a generalized, configurable ledger technology stack from which many different ledgers can be instantiated, each narrowly-tailored for their own use case, while using a common, extensible core data model.