TAPESTRY: A Blockchain based Service for Trusted Interaction Online

TL;DR

This paper introduces TAPESTRY, a blockchain-based service that leverages digital personhood signals to help users verify online identities and make informed trust decisions while preserving privacy.

Contribution

It presents a novel hybrid blockchain infrastructure with deep learning analytics for digital personhood, enabling privacy-preserving trust evidence exchange and behavioral analysis.

Findings

Enhanced trust decision-making for users.

Ability to detect account hijacking through behavioral deviations.

Effective visualization of digital identity provenance.

Abstract

We present a novel blockchain based service for proving the provenance of online digital identity, exposed as an assistive tool to help non-expert users make better decisions about whom to trust online. Our service harnesses the digital personhood (DP); the longitudinal and multi-modal signals created through users' lifelong digital interactions, as a basis for evidencing the provenance of identity. We describe how users may exchange trust evidence derived from their DP, in a granular and privacy-preserving manner, with other users in order to demonstrate coherence and longevity in their behaviour online. This is enabled through a novel secure infrastructure combining hybrid on- and off-chain storage combined with deep learning for DP analytics and visualization. We show how our tools enable users to make more effective decisions on whether to trust unknown third parties online, and also to spot behavioural deviations in their own social media footprints indicative of account hijacking.