Decentralized Identity Systems: Architecture, Challenges, Solutions and Future Directions

Abstract

Due to the exponential rise of the Internet in the last two decades, the digital presence has seen an enormous increase. Today, billions of people, devices and objects are digitally connected making the interactions much easier than before. To securely establish this connectivity in the digital era, proving digital identities has become crucial. Due to this, a growing number of organizations are building solutions that establish, verify and manage digital identities. Yet, a solution whereby digital identities and their associated data are efficiently managed is still far from being achieved. To fully understand the reason behind this lack, this paper provides a detailed state of the art related to identity management systems. It overviews traditional systems, analyses their strengths and limitations. This work highly focuses on the novel decentralized identity systems based on blockchain; a complete study describing their architecture, components, lifecycle and workflow is detailed. Additionally, solutions enabling decentralized identity are discussed, analysed and compared according to the ten principles of self-sovereign identity. Lastly, the challenges hindering the shift toward the fully decentralized identity paradigm are discussed.

Self-Sovereign Identity: A Systematic Review, Mapping and Taxonomy

“…However, while blockchain assists the development of SSI solutions, it is not a requirement [6,8,84,148]. Nonetheless, existing reviews claim that SSI necessarily needs blockchain to be implemented [32,48,71,78,83,86,102,162]. With regards to the review methodology of these works, two surveys provided details about their search strategy [78,86] while six did not [32,48,71,83,102,162].…”

“…Nonetheless, existing reviews claim that SSI necessarily needs blockchain to be implemented [32,48,71,78,83,86,102,162]. With regards to the review methodology of these works, two surveys provided details about their search strategy [78,86] while six did not [32,48,71,83,102,162]. Next, we present the existing secondary studies in the field of SSI.…”

eID and Self-Sovereign Identity Usage: An Overview

“…SSI projects face different challenges. Dib and Toumi [40] categorized those into technical limitations and nontechnical issues. Regarding technical limitations, they stated blockchain as the distributed ledger and key storage.…”

“…With both Dib and Toumi [40] and Kubach et al [41] describing different types of challenges, we first need a generic taxonomy. This taxonomy can then be applied to the projects, helping to identify challenges.…”

“…Regarding the challenges Dib and Toumi [40] found, the technical limitations were included in the technological factors. Nontechnical issues were spread across other factors.…”