Recommender System for Self-Sovereign Identity

Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) is a new approach to digital identity management that ensures data owners have absolute control over their identity data storage and management. Despite the growing interest in the technology, the adoption in the real-world environment remains low. One of the reasons for this is the challenge of trust in a new technology [1]. Many still do not recognize the privacy benefits such a system can provide for a specific domain, resulting in a communication challenge and lack of trust. Additionally, trust in verifiers and other parties is difficult to achieve because there is no feasible way to quantify it [1]

A novel recommender system built into an SSI application may be beneficial in facilitating trust in the verifiers. However, this direction has not been explored in the existing literature yet. Several works have investigated the research directions in distributed recommendation systems [2] and a decentralized recommendation approach for the Social Internet of Things. Some attempts were made to develop a recommender for Web3 applications [4], blockchain-based recommender [5], and recommendation system for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) [6] which may provide a more suitable starting point for an SSI system

To succeed in this thesis, an excellent literature exploration that is not limited to the domain of SSI, but extends to distributed recommendation systems, will be required. Critical thinking and ability to apply concepts across different domains is the foundation of this thesis

References:

[1] D. Schumm, K. O. E. Müller and B. Stiller, "Are We There Yet? A Study of Decentralized Identity Applications", in IEEE Access, vol. 13, pp. 125232-125259, 2025, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3588170.

[2] Q. Cai, J. Cao, G. Xu and N. Zhu, "Distributed Recommendation Systems: Survey and Research Directions", ACM Transactions on Information Systems 43, no. 1 (2024): 1-38.

[3] D. Defiebre, D. Sacharidis and P. Germanakos, "A decentralized recommendation engine in the social internet of things", In Adjunct Publication of the 28th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, pp. 77-82. 2020.

[4] R. Madhwal and J. Pouwelse, "Web3Recommend: Decentralised recommendations with trust and relevance", arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.01411 (2023).

[5] D. Bobadilla and C. Lipizzi, "A blockchain-based collaborative filtering recommendation system based on trust", In 2021 18th International Computer Conference on Wavelet Active Media Technology and Information Processing (ICCWAMTIP), pp. 121-126. IEEE, 2021.

[6] E. Gras, R. George, K. Churchill and M. Kiruthika, "A recommendation system for decentralized autonomous organization", In 2022 OPJU International Technology Conference on Emerging Technologies for Sustainable Development (OTCON), pp. 1-6. IEEE, 2023

• Critical thinking
• Distributed systems / blockchain
• Interest in recommender systems