Blockchain based Identity Management and Ticketing for MaaS

Trabalho de projeto de mestrado, Engenharia Informatica (Engenharia de Software) Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2020As time moves further into the 21st century, the world is progressively becoming more sophisticated, and our capacity to forecast the future is decreasing at the same rate. The emerging global problems require new kinds of tools paving the way to move forward. Across Europe, privatised public transport systems are frequently conceived in separation by an operator resulting in legacy systems with proprietary ticketing solutions causing fragmentation and lack of uniformity of information. The Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) concept promises to solve existing problems in the transport industry since it allows the integration of different mobility services, such as car and bicycle sharing, among others, with traditional public transport. To plan a trip, passengers have several mobility options, interconnected to each other, with a range of alternatives according to their preferences. However, it is a huge challenge to expand the MaaS network that includes several operators. Recent innovations in Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, especially the current developments of smart contracts, it is expected that a novel distributed approach to MaaS is finally feasible. MaaS systems benefit from the power of Blockchain disruptive technology, improving transparency and trust among service providers thereby eliminat ing the middle tier. In order to implement the new MaaS concept and take advantage of the high volumes of data relating to passengers and their tickets, it is essential that trans port operators have a unified system, thus allowing each participant to create, view and modify the information. This project enables the development of a new ticketing solution based on Blockchain, with an Identity Management module capable of managing the identities of passengers across the entire system, as well as the creation of a MaaS application mock-up for the passenger. Finally, the proposed system is evaluated in terms of operation and perfor mance, according predefined use cases and requirements. Results are achieved in terms of the collaboration between multiple service providers operating on a single platform

Privacy Law Issues in Public Blockchains: An Analysis of Blockchain, PIPEDA, The GDPR, and Proposals for Compliance

Proponents of blockchain proclaim that the technology’s greatest innovation is trust. Blockchain create trust by serving as an indispensable ledger (a central point of truth), for all stakeholders to a transaction. Instead of companies managing and reconciling records of the same transaction in privately held databases, both sides of a transaction are recorded simultaneously on a shared ledger — the blockchain. As a result, the crypto economic environment is characterized by the decentralized coordination of business processes and transactions. Proponents of crypto-economics regard decentralized coordination as an opportunity for new forms of economic innovation, forms designed to increase value for individuals and decrease the power of intermediaries. Blockchains enable decentralized coordination by increasing the transparency of information between parties. Transparency allows the blockchain network to police itself by allowing users to collectively verify the legitimacy of every network transaction. Agents to a transaction can presume fair play in this system because the transparency, security, and immutability of data should theoretically lead to increased accountability for all participants

The Horcrux Protocol: A Method for Decentralized Biometric-based Self-sovereign Identity

Most user authentication methods and identity proving systems rely on a centralized database. Such information storage presents a single point of compromise from a security perspective. If this system is compromised it poses a direct threat to users' digital identities. This paper proposes a decentralized authentication method, called the Horcrux protocol, in which there is no such single point of compromise. The protocol relies on decentralized identifiers (DIDs) under development by the W3C Verifiable Claims Community Group and the concept of self-sovereign identity. To accomplish this, we propose specification and implementation of a decentralized biometric credential storage option via blockchains using DIDs and DID documents within the IEEE 2410-2017 Biometric Open Protocol Standard (BOPS)