Fujitsu’s new blockchain-based technology aims to enable safer online transactions

Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd, a subsidiary of Japanese tech giant Fujitsu Ltd (TYO:6702), has developed a digital identity technology that makes it possible for individual users and businesses involved in online transactions to confirm the identity of other parties in transactions.

The new solution is based on a Decentralized Identification (DID) utilizing blockchain that analyzes the risk of falsification and the trustworthiness of the other party’s personal credentials when a user conducts a transaction online. The new technology achieves this through a mutual evaluation of the users when a transaction occurs, and by inferring the relationships between users based on past transaction data.

DID is a system in which a third party guarantees the accuracy of a given individual’s identity and personal credentials. If a service business or user conspires with a third party acting in bad faith, however, it is possible to falsify a person’s history or credentials, creating the risk that this falsified information will spread very widely without being discovered. Moreover, as the number of users who utilize these services increases, it becomes more difficult for users or a third party to grasp what sort of people the other parties are, increasing the possibility of maleficence. This necessitates a system whereby users can evaluate for themselves the truthfulness of the identity of the other parties in the transaction.

Expanding on its past use of blockchain technology, Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a new digital identity exchange technology for safely circulating personal credentials in a form that enables users to confirm the trustworthiness of the other party, drawing on factors including the status of previous transactions and evaluations by users who had engaged in transactions with the party in question, as part of a decentralized identification system.

Through Fujitsu’s new identity exchange technology, evaluations (e.g. reputation and rating) for each user in a transaction are recorded as a series of transaction data. By storing these evaluations on the unfalsifiable distributed ledger of a blockchain, this system can improve the reliability of insights into the trustworthiness about each user.

The system converts the trustworthy transaction data about individuals shared on the blockchain into a graph structure so that the relationships between users can be understood. A trustworthiness score is attached to each user by weighting factors including how many trusted users evaluate them highly. Even if a user colludes with a third party to improperly raise their evaluation, the graph-structured relationships will reveal information such as the weakness of their relationships with other users, giving the system the potential to identify misrepresentations.

Users can have their credentials verified with only a partial disclosure of relevant data, allowing for safe and highly-reliable transactions without forcing users to offer unnecessary personal details.