GADI, The Global Association for Digital Identity, an initiative of the DID Alliance, is the most secure way to protect businesses and users from data breaches. The first iteration of the GADI Specification system is expected by the end of 2020.
The DID Alliance launched in October 2019 as the managing body for the development and maintenance of new industry standards for decentralized identity. It is co-founded by Ramesh Kesanupalli, co-founder of the FIDO Alliance (fidoalliance.org) and founder of NokNok Labs, and Soonhyung Lee, founder and CEO of Raonsecure.DID Alliance founding members include: Badge Inc., CLEAR, ClearFoundation, Digital Trust, FEITIAN, Identity.com, KFTC, LG CNS, MobileIron, NH Bank, Nok Nok Labs, Onfido, Raonsecure, Samsung SDS, Sensory, Shinhan Bank, and Sovrin Foundation.
“Think of GADI as the ICANN of personal identity,” says GADI visionary and DID Alliance co-founder Ramesh Kesanupalli. “ICANN enables a global internet where every address is unique and authentic. Similarly, GADI will assure verifiable, authorized identity for every individual on the globe, whether online or in a physical world applications.” ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) helps coordinate the technical services critical to the continued operations of the Internet's underlying address book, the Domain Name System (DNS). “Just as an ICANN address is under the control of a domain owner, each GADI identity will be under an individual’s sole control.”
“We want to empower a global DID ecosystem to overcome the limits of centralized services as well as problems of independent identity systems,” said Soonhyung Lee, DID Alliance co-founder and CEO of Raonsecure. “The DID Alliance, through GADI technology, will connect human identity to digital identity. Its international, collaborative network of global partners is focused on solving problems including data and privacy breaches, while also looking to remove fundamental identity issues that prevent access to basic rights.”
“The primary inhibitor to enabling consistently secure access controls is the exponentially increasing complexity of disparate identity services. GADI offers the greatest potential for unifying all user identities in order to eliminate end-user friction while accelerating security assurance,“ said Research Director Steve Brasen, for the analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates [Report: Passwordless Authentication: Bridging the Gap Between High-Security and Low-Friction Identity Management]
Individuals often relinquish control of identity and personal identifying information (PII) to centralized databases that are managed by companies and institutions we deal with every day. This does not allow individuals to control their online identities. Decentralized identity systems disrupt this existing model and would be able to restore exclusive and local control of identity and PII while limiting the risk of fraud, identity theft, and increasing privacy. It does this while strictly maintaining credential issuers’ standards of trust and accountability.
The GADI approach ensures verifiable digital identities for each individual, including the 25 percent of people on earth today who have no identifying credentials. No one is excluded because a Digital Address issued in the GADI system allows a user to privately determine the factors that will identify the individual for life. With unmatched user choice and determination over what factors comprise one’s individual identity, GADI immediately limits - and eventually eliminates - the validity of common (often compromised) identifiers that have been used in the past.
