Three years ago, as part of Microsoft’s mission to empower people and organizations to achieve more, we announced that we were incubating a new set of decentralized identity technologies based on a simple vision:
Each of us needs a digital identity we own, one which securely and privately stores all elements of our digital identity. This self-owned identity must be easy to use and give us complete control over how our identity data is accessed and used.
During this incubation, customers and partners all around the world have helped us understand their challenges and the shortcomings of their existing identity systems. We’ve learned a ton through a set of successful proof of concepts partnering with Keio University,1 The National Health Service (UK),2 and the Government of Flanders.3 We’ve worked with our partners in the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) and the open standards community to develop standards and demonstrate interoperability.
Using these new open standards and all these learnings to guide us, we turned on the public preview of our new decentralized identity system—Microsoft Azure Active Directory Verifiable Credentials—in April 2021. That preview generated a ton of valuable feedback and gave us the opportunity to learn from all of you.
Through all these interactions and investments, we have become even more excited about the opportunity to create a decentralized identity system that increases customer trust and adoption by minimizing data processing and providing the user much greater control of the specific identity data they share and how it will be used.
Now we are well into the next phase of our plan, working on two parallel efforts:
In this new phase, we want to share the set of guiding principles that we will use to guide both efforts. Not all these principles will be realizable from the start, but we believe that all are necessary over time to realize the promise of decentralized identities:
