One of the most difficult digital security problems is to create ways for establishing digital identities that are useful in a wide range of applications but remain secure.

Future Horizons:

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5-yearhorizon

AI identity theft threatens democracy

State-sponsored AI cybercrime combines the data from multiple security leaks to produce convincing patchworked identities for large-scale fraud. This theft occurs on such a large scale that it threatens banking systems, healthcare and even democracy. Passwords become a rarely used means of authentication, replaced by passwordless approaches. Autonomous agents trade on their owners' behalf using networks of verifiable trust that occasionally, through unpredictable herding behaviour, creates runs on certain types of goods, leading to shortages and profiteering. Encryption protocols such as PGP and SPKI flourish.

10-yearhorizon

The notion of personal identity mutates

The notion of one identity per person begins to change with the legitimate use of multiple IDs. This creates diverse social landscapes, with the opportunity to segment an online existence to share different parts of each individual's life with different groups of people. A new breed of security attack via the internet of things, particularly medical devices, poses a life-threatening risk for millions of people.

25-yearhorizon

Establishing and protecting identity becomes routine

Identity-authenticating technology is developed in ways that allow even young children and technology-disadvantaged individuals to establish and protect their identities.

This will mean consideration of indirect insecurities, such as LGBTQ+ people being unwillingly identified because of data-sharing leading to openly targeted advertising,⁴ doxing⁵ or even physical attacks. Identity security relies on data policies and software routines as well as on unlinkability⁶ and secure hardware implementations such as “secure enclaves”. It is likely that unlinkability will allow people to maintain several legitimate identities simultaneously, for example. Multifactor authentication is used now, but its importance is likely to grow, with distributed and independent issuers of factors making identity theft much harder than it is today.

Reliable means of establishing identity will be key as autonomous agents begin to augment people in certain decision-making scenarios. These agents will need their own identities that are securely linked to their owners. This kind of distributed decision-making raises broader issues about the way human identity will evolve in future. What’s more, establishing the identity of machines is an important issue for the internet of things,⁷ which consists of devices with limited power, network and computational ability. Identity in this context will have to be established by methods that do not rely on strong encryption, network connections and so on. Ensuring that these mechanisms are secure and fit for purpose is an ongoing area of study.

Digital identity - Anticipation Scores

The Anticipation Potential of a research field is determined by the capacity for impactful action in the present, considering possible future transformative breakthroughs in a field over a 25-year outlook. A field with a high Anticipation Potential, therefore, combines the potential range of future transformative possibilities engendered by a research area with a wide field of opportunities for action in the present. We asked researchers in the field to anticipate:

The uncertainty related to future science breakthroughs in the field
The transformative effect anticipated breakthroughs may have on research and society
The scope for action in the present in relation to anticipated breakthroughs.

This chart represents a summary of their responses to each of these elements, which when combined, provide the Anticipation Potential for the topic. See methodology for more information.