As part of my graduate Information Security degree studies, I was required to complete a practicum project to serve as a capstone. I chose to focus on a new approach to application development via public blockchains, which provides users with true online ownership and identity control.
Motivation
My interest in this new paradigm of application development became clear while I was managing the backend for an access control startup. I realized that I had the ability to impersonate any user within our application. This reliance on trust in service operators is a fundamental issue that blockchain applications address through the nature of asymmetric cryptography in every transaction. Furthermore, I could manipulate or erase access logs if I wanted, a problem that blockchains solve by providing immutable transaction records.