Self-sovereign identity decentralized identifiers, claims and credentials using non decentralized ledger technology
Year: 2021
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Current identity management systems rely on centralized databases to store user’s personal data, which poses a great risks for data security, as these infrastructure create a critical point of failure for the whole system. Beside that service providers have to bear huge maintenance costs and comply with strict data protection regulations. Self-sovereign identity (SSI) is a new identity management paradigm that tries to answer some of these problems by providing a decentralized user-centric identity management system that gives users full control of their personal data. Some of its underlying concepts include Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), Verifiable Claims and Credentials. This approach does not rely on any central authority to enforce trust as it often uses Blockchain or other Decentralized Ledger Technologies (DLT) as the trust anchor of the system, although other decentralized network or databases could also be used for the same purpose. This thesis focuses on finding alternative solutions to DLT, in the context of SSI. Despite being the most used solution some DLTs are known to lack scalability and performance, and since a global identity management system heavily relies on these two requirements it might not be the best solution to the problem. This document provides an overview of the state of the art and main standards of SSI, and then focuses on a non-DLT approach to SSI, referencing non-DLT implementations and alternative decentralized infrastructures that can be used to replace DLTs in SSI. It highlights some of the limitations associated with using DLTs for identity management and presents a SSI framework based on decentralized names systems and networks. This framework couples all the main functionalities needed to create different SSI agents, which were showcased in a proof of concept application.
Author: Oliveira, Bruno Miguel Gomes
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7052303157