Page 467 - Kaleidoscope Academic Conference Proceedings 2024

Innovation and Digital Transformation for a Sustainable World

architectures from the data identification design flow. This is 4.4 Censorship resistance
done by giving individuals tools such as digital wallets to
manage who has access to their data for verification and Decentralization, immutability, transparency, and peer-to-
transaction services via their personal devices. SSI design peer networking creates an environment resistant to
flow uses claims (requests), proofs (evidence), and censorship. Coupled with privacy models such as SSI this
attestations (validation) allowing individuals to choose what allows for everyone to participate equally in the conversation
they share and when. As well as the increase to personal about local, state, and global policy without fear of
privacy this model reduces risk derived from attacks to large retribution. However, we must be cognoscente that although
scale centralized data stores. Through this design individuals the blockchain itself is censorship resistant, the application
create unique decentralized identifiers (DIDs) to create layer could still introduce control points or vulnerabilities
public keys for verification allowing secure peer-to-peer that potentially allow censorship. Therefore, it is essential we
connections. This is supported by authentication, service introduce technology design principles that discourage
endpoints, timestamps, and private key signatures to ensure development that may allow for this, whilst championing
verifiable histories. As well as offering opportunities for designs that introduce real self-sovereign privacy controls.
removing intermediaries from the verification process for Other challenges that have been raised include concerns over
individuals, SSI can be used by legal entities to verify their anonymity being an opportunity for increased illicit and/or
DID with company documents. One main challenge to SSI society damaging activities. A study of Tor entry nodes
is its lack of interoperability, although developments such as estimated that around 6.7% network users accessed
OpenAPI Specification and Open Telemetry standards are ‘Onion/Hidden Services’ that are disproportionally used for
working towards addressing this. Once challenges are illicit activities [42]. However, one problem with using Tor
addressed however, SSI alongside the blockchain becomes based indicators in discussions regarding the impact of
integral to removing centralized surveillance models. increased web privacy, is that Tor users are already a sub-set
of technically competent web users looking for increased
4.2 Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) privacy to avoid corporate and government oversight.
Therefore, it could be argued that the percentage of those
DAO’s are models built on blockchains utilizing W3.0 doing so for negative social benefits is higher than those who
technologies, digital assets, and democratic decision-making currently do not seek Tor protections and are interacting with
processes to distribute resources and coordinate activities. the web in the knowledge that they may be being surveilled.
They constitute technical frameworks that allow governance
and consensus decision making by eligible participants, 4.5 Security vulnerabilities
which leads to collaborative user stakeholder engagement
and drives collective benefits rather than individualistic There are several potential security vulnerabilities for the
corporate benefits. The privacy element of this model allows blockchain such as 51% attacks, poorly written smart
for distributed funding without identity bias, thereby contracts, Sybil attacks, routing attacks, time-jacking, and
improving the human rights of groups who may otherwise be endpoint vulnerabilities, although the impact to personal data
marginalized by centralized organizations. As DAOs are is minimized by its structure. Whilst a single individual may
underpinned by automated smart contract parameters, it is suffer loss of data through a smart contract vulnerability or
essential that contracts are designed with privacy-preserving end-point security breach, the effort and cost to complete
mechanisms that only require essential data points to execute these kinds of attacks on a mass scale for the purpose of
the steps needed to complete the contract. Whilst DAOs accessing data becomes a deterrent to malicious agents. That
allow transactions and governance without the need for an does not remove the risk altogether, as we are aware of the
intermediary to collect and store personal data, privacy proliferation of social engineering phishing scams but the
remains paramount in a model that requires transaction ability to access large data sets with a similar impact to
transparency to reinforce the token-based voting model. historical W2.0 breaches is made near impossible. By
moving the data loss risk from a centralized control point to
4.3 Data Cooperatives (DC) individual users through SSI, we increase protections against
malicious agents who would acquire mass datasets, mine the
Where DAOs focus on removing third party intermediaries, data for vulnerability markers, and make use of that
DCs are working on negotiating the terms of service against information for more targeted attacks on individuals. This
which intermediaries can remunerate members for access to increased protection frees users to be more open in
data pools. They are membership-based organizations expressing their identities without concerns about whether a
specifically focused on managing data as a collective source. central agent is appropriately protecting that information.
They are not inherently tied to the blockchain, with
distributed database, federated cloud service, encryption,
data trust frameworks, and API management all offering 4.6 Regulatory and watchdog oversight
potential avenues to create a DC. However, blockchain self-
sovereign protections have the potential to simplify and If we change our communication and trade structure from
increase trust to such concepts. Whilst DCs allow users to centralized institutions acting as gatekeepers, to peer-to-peer
monetize their data and often work on a one-member one- trading, what do we do if something goes wrong and our data
vote decision making basis, challenges arise if a member is breached? To avoid the centralized controls of the current
becomes unhappy with group decisions impacting their data. W2.0 model we must avoid creating brokers and agents that

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