AUTHORS
ABSTRACT
The wide adoption of wireless communication and mobile devices has facilitated the development of numerous applications to provide citizens with convenient access to health-related tracking and management services. Most of those services require the storage of some personal data and therefore resort to common user authentication practice (e.g., using a username and password combination) to ensure data is delivered to the appropriate party. As a result, users often find themselves having to maintain or memorize many combinations of accounts and their associated login credentials during their interaction with different services throughout the lifespan. Given the advancement of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, a wealth of services in various domains including health care has explored the feasibility of migrating existing centralized services to such decentralized infrastructures. Because of this exploration, traditionally centralized authentication approaches managed by one party can no longer support the need of onboarding users, managing, and monitoring user activities and transactions in a decentralized manner. A community of researchers has hence been formed to study blockchain-based identity solutions, such as decentralized identities and self-sovereign identities, that would allow users to have a more common way to identify themselves when accessing a plethora of services. The main goal of these identity methods is to eliminate the need of requiring users to maintain multiple identifiers or online credentials as each individual has only one identity that truly represents themselves. These identities would be established and secured by cryptographic principles such that they still preserve at least the same security and privacy levels as their centralized counterparts. In this chapter, we first present a systematic overview of the underlying motivations and principles of blockchain-based identities to provide the audience with a basic understanding of how such identities operate and the pressing need to incorporate them. We will also introduce two of the popular blockchain-based identity frameworks currently adopted in decentralized applications. We then discuss the potential applications of these identities and their feasibility using the health care domain as a case study to hopefully inspire our readers with ideas that can be further investigated as research solutions in the health care or other domains. Lastly, we will conclude the chapter with additional discussions on the practicality of blockchain-based identities and the potential caveats or limitations associated. This chapter will serve as a cornerstone for healthcare executives, informaticians, and security/privacy experts to further investigate and make infrastructural decisions.