A Truly Self-Sovereign Identity System

Abstract

Existing digital identity management systems fail to deliver the desirable properties of control by the users of their own identity data, credibility of disclosed identity data, and network-level anonymity. The recently proposed Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) approach promises to give users these properties. However, we argue that without addressing privacy at the network level, SSI systems cannot deliver on this promise. In this paper we present the design and analysis of our solution TCID, created in collaboration with the Dutch government. TCID is a system consisting of a set of components that together satisfy seven functional requirements to guarantee the desirable system properties. We show that the latency incurred by network-level anonymization in TCID is significantly larger than that of identity data disclosure protocols but is still low enough for practical situations. We conclude that current research on SSI is too narrowly focused on these data disclosure protocols.

eID and Self-Sovereign Identity Usage: An Overview

“…The approach by Stokkink et al [51] tries to narrow the gap between more academic SSI approaches on the one hand and functional and legal requirements of governments on the other hand. The authors proposed the utilization of IPv8 as a successor to IPv4 and IPv6, which tightly integrates identities, with a decentralized public key infrastructure (PKI) and an anonymizing SSI overlay.…”

“…In 2018, Trustchain started to evolve [128][129][130]. In the latest publication by Stokkink et al [51], described in Section 3, they tried to narrow down the gap between scientific SSI and government. The approach has the advantage of privacy, while the federated infrastructure might not be usable anymore.…”

“…Dependent on the integration into the current infrastructure and the architecture, third parties might be involved. These can reduce the privacy [51]. In addition, biometrics for authentication are typically required.…”

NSSIA: A New Self-Sovereign Identity Scheme with Accountability

“…According to the goals to achieve, existing SSI schemes can be divided into the following three categories: junior SSI schemes [17][18][19][20][21], SSI schemes with sybil-resistance [22][23][24][25][26], and SSI schemes with accountability [27,28]. To give users' control over their identities and data, junior SSI schemes adopt DID standards [17], smart contracts [18,19], or credential chain [21].…”

“…But unfortunately, the above schemes cannot reveal the identities of malicious users. To deal with the problem, SSI schemes with accountability [27,28] are proposed. Since users are represented by credential chains in [27], a regulatory authority checks the malicious credentials with the personal information in a central registry to identify the malicious users.…”