What is a (Digital) Identity Wallet? A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Identity management is crucial for any electronic service that needs to authenticate its users. Different identitymanagement models have been introduced and rolled out on a large scale during the past decades. Key distinguishing criteria of these models are the storage location of users' identity data and the degree of involvement of central entities such as identity providers, which can potentially track user behavior. Growing privacy awareness has led to a renaissance of usercentric identity-management models during the past few years. In this context, especially the concept of wallets applied to the digital identity domain has recently attracted attention, putting users into direct control of their identity data. Various approaches and solutions relying on this concept have been introduced recently. However, no generally accepted definitions of the concept "digital identity wallet" and of its related features and implementations exist so far, leading to considerable confusion in this domain.This paper addresses this issue by providing a systematic literature review on wallets applied to the digital identity domain to identify, analyze, and compare existing definitions, features, and capabilities of such solutions. By means of two research questions, this paper thereby contributes to a better understanding of identity wallets and the various recent developments in this domain.

Establishing altruistic ethics to use technology for Social Welfare—How Japan manages Web3 and self-sovereign identity in local communities

“…While the decision is yet to be made, the use of Web3 technology is one of the options considered at Mebuku Ground. The AML-compliant Mebuku system can be lawfully used to manage "digital assets" in digital wallets (Podgorelec et al, 2022) including cryptocurrencies and NFTs, while also securing high levels of anonymity -unless pursued by democratic due process (Bandara et al, 2021). As we will discuss in the next section, Web3 technologies are starting to be heavily used for local community revitalization which relies on NFTs as tokens of recognition for the contributions people make to the community.…”

Towards a Catalogue of Self-Sovereign Identity Design Patterns

“…All of these are based on software applications and an encrypted database where users (identity holders/controllers) store identifiers, cryptographic material (private keys), digital credentials, and other sensitive, private data. In addition to storage, such wallets usually support data acquisition, verification, management, and sharing [9], while recovery and backup represent a desired functionality. Various companies and governments endeavour to develop SSI wallets, and many are already available, e.g., VIDwallet, Trinsic Wallet, esatus Wallet, Connect.Me, Gataca, Lissi Wallet [10], SSI Snap [11], etc.…”

Orchestrating Digital Wallets for On- and Off-Chain Decentralized Identity Management

“…In [4], the authors performed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on digital identity wallets focusing on users' private data. Their results confirm the need for digital identity wallets, with the main reasons being having secure storage for cryptographic keys, ways to manage identifiers and data, and others.…”