Should the world’s largest biometric system be on blockchain?

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Max is a TIA Star Contributor and publishes high-value content that serves the Asian tech community. Read more from TIA Star Contributors here.

Aadhaar is an Indian government initiative to secure its residents’ rights to have an identity. It is the most comprehensive adoption of biometrics technology by any government in the world.

The system creates unique 12-digit numbers for all Indian residents, which are stored in a central database along with biometrics like fingerprints and iris scans. This secures transactions, as it “anchors” people’s identities to defined metrics, and is used to authenticate loans, pensions, and money transfers across the country.

But while groups like the World Bank champion it as having noble goals, saying it “helps willing governments to promote the inclusion of disadvantaged groups,” critics of Aadhaar have been vocal about its infrastructural flaws for years. Security breaches have reportedly kept growing and “Big Brother” fears linger. Could blockchain help solve this problem?

Criticisms

For all its potential, critics lambaste Aadhaar for enabling the creation of a surveillance state. Academics like German professor Ursula Rao have written extensively on the problems of the initiative. For her, Aadhaar is creating new relations between citizens and the state.

Effectively, Aadhaar is optional—the Indian Supreme Court ruled that enrollment is not mandatory—but it is continually linked to numerous services, including income tax filing. Not using it remains very inconvenient.

Petitioners are challenging Aadhaar in the Supreme Court on numerous grounds. Privacy is one of the concerns, but the manner in which the program was legislated may also have been unconstitutional.

Should a biometric ID database of this magnitude be on blockchain?

If Aadhaar is put on a blockchain, it would be a distributed database, not a central one. But could this work?

A blockchain is a chain of data that is linearly secured using cryptography. Jagdish Pandya (founder of Cryptocurrency Expo) suggests that the database should be on the blockchain. “Right now, all information on Aadhaar is public,” he says. Being able to protect the public information through the integrity of the blockchain is very important for the future of the system. Pandya also says that this should be dependent on the context of the information, for example medical data.

Praneet Kumar (a lawyer-turned-blockchain-evangelist), on the other hand, argues that Aadhaar is a very expensive technology, and integrating it with blockchain could be prohibitive. “The entire migration to blockchain may not make sense,” he says. “But the Indian government is considering migrating certain areas.”

Kumar (who is also the co-founder of the Global Blockchain Foundation) suggests that even if Aadhaar is migrated to the blockchain, security will be ensured:

The entire Aadhar database doesn’t need to come on blockchain. Using an appropriate protocol like Ethereum, we should make a permissioned blockchain, and each node/block will be authenticated by the network. Only user authentication should be migrated to blockchain—this would create a private network to restrict data leakage, as APIs are the key source of data compromise.

Still nascent in India

Positive signs

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