Since its development to the public since the mid-90s, Internet has been characterized as an official democratic network without effective regulation and identification layer: anyone can do anything she wants with a certain degree of anonymity, indeed no personal identification is required to join it.
To avoid anarchy, some online services ask us to prove our identity requiring sensitive, personal information, which are stored in their databases. Once their own data are in cloud, people lose the control over them, and their property moves to the service providers, creating a monopolistic market of data, sometimes with malicious intents. Moreover, some data-driven companies gain profits from selling those data to advertising services i.e., Facebook, with no economic benefits for users.
It’s notorious the case of Cambridge Analytica, which acquired personal data from Facebook’s users to change the fate of the presidential elections, creating fake advertisements to change people’s mind about who to vote. We foresee that access to the metaverses and economic transactions within them will be allowed thanks to the blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, which grant anonymity by definition. Medusa has the potential to efficiently address the issue of identity theft, control over personal data shared, users’ anonymity and a safer meta-environment.
Minting Process Using the Medusa decentralized application, an identity NFT can be minted using a digital signature-like process, where the public key is the hash of personal IDs (namely ID HASH) and the private key is the user’s biometric trace (BIO HASH).
The steps to create a user’s meta-digital identity, stored in the NFT HASH:
- Medusa enters into a partnership agreement with a trusted digital identity verifier such as SPID. The SPID platform will provide the hashed version of the user's personal information to Medusa. Medusa will only retain the hashed version and not the unencrypted (ex. ABC) version.
- The user will provide a unique biometric trace i.e., fingerprint, which will generate a local hash, of which no other actor will be informed (123).
- Medusa will generate a hash formed by combining the previous two hashes. This hash will be the identification code of the NFT and therefore of the digital identity (123ABC).
- The NFT will be minted and uploaded to a wallet supporting the ERC-20 standard.
- For each meta-platform, the user will be able to decide which of the data contained in SPID she wants to make available in plain text. It is possible, in fact, that in a meta-event the user will be required to be of legal age, verifiable only with a real identity document. In the login process, after minting:
- The HASH ID is held locally by the Medusa app for 30 days. A new login (ABC) will be required every 30 days.
- The user is prompted to log in to their wallet: Medusa will detect the presence of a NFT HASH: 123ABC.
- The user will also be required to provide their biometric track, the hash of which is 123.
- Medusa creates the hash given by the combination of ID HASH and BIO HASH: if there is a concordance between this and the NFT HASH the identity will be verified. In case of an infraction reported by other users, Medusa will disable the NFT HASH of the "guilty" user: Medusa will not know his identity, but the individual will not have the possibility to join the metaverse again: each NFT HASH, being given by the combination of factors attributable to a single individual, will correspond to one and only one person