1 Why the Internet is missing an identity layer—and why SSI can finally provide one
by Alex Preukschat and Drummond Reed
—Kim Cameron, Microsoft Chief Identity Architect, The Laws of Identity, May 2005[1]
What did Kim Cameron—Microsoft’s Chief Identity Architect since 2004—mean by that quote? What is an “identity layer?” Kim gives an answer in his groundbreaking series of essays called The Laws of Identity, published on his blog over a series of months in 2004 and 2005:
The Internet was built without a way to know who and what you are connecting to. This limits what we can do with it and exposes us to growing dangers. If we do nothing, we will face rapidly proliferating episodes of theft and deception that will cumulatively erode public trust in the Internet.
What Kim was saying is that when the internet was initially designed in the 1960s and 1970s, the problem it was designed to solve was how to connect machines across local area networks (LANs). LANs had already grown very popular—there were tens of thousands of them around the globe—so now the challenge was how to connect them with each other, so data and messages could flow across networks and not just within them.
The solution—the TCP/IP protocol and packet-based data exchange—was so brilliant that it finally enabled a true “network of networks.” And the rest, as they say, is history.