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FINAL WORD
Digital Identity:
Defining ourselves in a
virtual world
SAP Africa’s Head of Innovation and South Africa’s Mars
One candidate, Dr Adriana Marais, talks about taking back
ownership of our identities in the digital world, through
the compelling application of blockchain.
W
e’re bringing information and
devices online at an unprecedented
rate, raising one of the
fundamental questions of our time: how do
we represent ourselves in this digital world that
we are creating? And more importantly, how
do we secure our identity in a digital world?
We’ve heard about blockchain for currencies
and smart contracts, a compelling and crucial
application is in securing online identity.
For four billion years, the genetic code has
been life’s data store, containing not only
instructions for but also the lineage of all
terrestrial life. Over the past few hundred
thousand years, a new species has emerged,
one that is rapidly and inexhaustibly producing
huge volumes of data of their own: humans.
A brief history of humanity’s data affair
We have observed the world and made
sense of it through language for as long as
we’ve existed. Armed with the technologies
we developed, we peered inside atoms and
learned something about the behaviour of the
fundamental particles including electrons and
photons that we have found there. Developing
capabilities to manipulate collections of these
units of electricity and light has led to a series
of technological revolutions that has had a
fundamental impact on how we store, analyse
and communicate information about our world.
The network of networks, the Internet, has
evolved over time from a range of contributing
developments by mathematicians, scientists
and engineers. In each decade from the
1940s, inventions included the transistor, the
computer, computer networks, remote access
to computing power, software and documents
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INTELLIGENTCIO
and finally, by the mid-1990s, commercial
service providers ensured increasingly global
connectivity. Near-instant text and audio-
visual communication and the emergence
of social media and online services across
industries have vastly transformed our society
in a remarkably short space of time.
The benefits of increased connectivity come
with the associated risk around how the
information that we create, communicate
and store can be intercepted, sometimes with
malicious intent. Cryptography is the ancient
art of achieving confidentiality by transforming
a message such that is only intelligible to
someone in possession of a key. Since the
emergence of the Internet, a multitude
of algorithms for data security have been
developed and global standards for encryption
protocols provide some level of communications
security over our computer networks.
Just months after the financial crash of
2008, the first digital currency to employ
cryptography to solve the problem of double-
spending without the requirement for a
central trusted third party was proposed.
That currency was Bitcoin, now valued at over
US$100 billion and one of over 1,000 different
cryptocurrencies. The technology underlying
this decentralised capability is a distributed
ledger, or blockchain. Transactions are
recorded in blocks that are linked and secured
by cryptography, these records are verified
and stored across a network making the ledger
resistant to modification.
The really interesting part is that blockchain,
the combination of capabilities in computing,
connectivity and cryptography, has
applications not only in the financial world, but
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