Northern Block’s Blog

Insights and News from the Forefront of Self-sovereign Identity

Offering Outputs, Not Restrictions

The purpose of this blog post is to argue that, instead of expanding controls and imposing unnecessary restrictions on interactions outside their locus of control, single identity system providers should prioritize feeding outputs into identity metasystems to use as...

Prioritizing Governance Assertions Over Identity Assertions

Are there cases where focusing on governance instead of identity helps achieve our same digital trust goals, while enhancing privacy preservation? In user-controlled digital identity, we often classify entities under the categories of Issuers, Holders and Verifiers....

Chapter 3 – Digital Trust (from Attaining Sovereignty by Unlocking Digital Trust)

We live in an Internet environment where we lack trust due to the lack of true identities. This results in dealing with billions of anonymous people who can come into your sphere and expect...

Chapter 2 – Digital Identity (from Attaining Sovereignty by Unlocking Digital Trust)

In March 2021, the prime ministers of Estonia, Finland, Denmark and Germany called on the European Union (EU) to speed up "digital sovereignty" and the creation of the "digital single market". The four countries wrote in a letter that "digital sovereignty" means...

Chapter 1 – Digital Sovereignty (from Attaining Sovereignty by Unlocking Digital Trust)

In the world of self-sovereign identity (SSI), there are various opinions about using the word sovereignty for describing the ambitions that we are trying to achieve through our principles, values, standards, technologies and governance frameworks. Some people refrain...

Attaining Sovereignty by Unlocking Digital Trust

We wrote An Introduction to Digital Trust in 2021 so that we could send it as a resource to people looking for a simple explainer. It’s proved helpful so far. Since then however, the market has matured. We’ve seen a steady increase in global self-sovereign identity...

Trust Over IP Foundation: The First Public Review Draft of the Technology Architecture V1.0 Specification

Spending a few days at the Internet Identity Workshop 35 in San Francisco provided a great opportunity to catch up on some reading. I was especially curious about one of the recent items that was published by the Trust Over IP Foundation, the first public...

Northern Block Participates in the DIACC Foundational ID Report

Northern Block Solutions leveraged to support the Digital ID and Authentication Council of Canada (DIACC)'s work on Foundational Digital Identity Throughout 2021-2022, Northern Block took part in the Digital ID and Authentication Council of Canada...