A Design and Prototype of a Unified Approach to Blockchain-Based Self-Sovereign Identity Platforms

MA, MP

State: Open

Published: 2023-12-18

Description:

Both academia and commercial companies contribute a significant amount of solutions and proposed architectures for better digital identities. Those solutions usually address a specific isolated technical problem or propose a completely new architecture designed for a niche use case (e.g., healthcare). However, such an approach continues to expand a number of available digital identity platforms, instead of providing a unified solution that can be used in different domains. This leads us back to the original issue of having a large number of identity platforms and isolated ecosystems, without flexibility of using a single identity across different platforms interchangeably [1]. Thus, failing to advance the benefits of an interoperable digital identity across different domains.
Future decentralised identity systems should consider a “multi-ecosystem approach” because verifiers and issues are likely to have different ecosystems with their own standards and governance models [2]. Such an approach would provide a more scalable and realistic solution to identity management [2].
Interoperability and portability are the core concepts to achieve a single unified identity [3]. Therefore, this research focuses on those issues before designing and implementing a unified mechanism.

Problem:

There is no unifying mechanism for SSI ecosystems.
Each ecosystem currently is separated and it is unclear how interoperability and portability can be guaranteed.

Goals:

Investigate what has been done so far to ensure interoperability and portability of digital identities in SSI platforms.
Design an interoperability and portability mechanism for unifying existing SSI platforms.
Implement the solution.
Evaluate based on security and privacy of data, decentralisation (e.g., if there are centralised components that are necessary), scalability, performance, costs.

References:

H. Yildiz, A. Kupper, D. Thatmann, S. Gondor and P. Herbke, “Toward Interoperable Self-Sovereign Identities”, IEEE Access, 2023. DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3313723.
A. Slavin, “Reimagining Digital ID”, World Economic Forum, 2023. Available: https://www.weforum.org/publications/reimagining-digital-id/.
A. Grüner, A. Mühle and C. Meinel, “Analysing Interoperability and Portability Concepts for Self-Sovereign Identity”, IEEE 20th International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom), 2021. DOI: 10.1109/TRUSTCOM53373.2021.00089.
H. Yildiz, A. Kupper, D. Thatmann, S. Gondor and P. Herbke, “A Tutorial on the Interoperability of Self-sovereign Identities”, arXiv, 2022. DOI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.04692.
C. Allen, “The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity”, 2016. Available: https://www.lifewithalacrity.com/article/the-path-to-self-soverereign-identity/.
C. Allen, “Self-Sovereign Identity: 5 Years On The Initial Design, Development, and Deployment of SSI”, 2021. Available: https://www.lifewithalacrity.com/article/SSI-5-Years-On/.
S. Cucko, S. Becirovic, A. Kamisalic, S. Mrdovic and M. Turkanovic, “Towards the Classification of Self-Sovereign Identity Properties”, IEEE Access, 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2112.04155.

20% related work, 25% design, 25% implementation, 25% evaluation, 5% documentation

Supervisors: Daria Schumm