On Aadhaar Identity Management System

Abstract: A unique identification for citizens can lead to effective governance to manage and provide citizen-centric services. While ensuring this service, privacy of the citizens needs to be preserved. Aadhaar, the identification system by UIDAI has faced some critics regarding its privacy preserving feature. This paper discusses those concerns in Aadhaar system and proposed a new model for the Aadhaar system. The proposed solution is aimed to address the issue of collusion of third party service providers and profiling of Aadhaar users. The proposed solution uses a distributed model capturing the Aadhaar system, in which data of users is decentralized and stored in zonal office's databases as well as the CIDR. The proposed solution provides the functioning of the authentication process of the Aadhaar system more effective, as it reduces the number of requests being handled directly by the CIDR and also tackles the concern of correlation of data.