Self-sovereign Identity $-$ Opportunities and Challenges for the Digital Revolution

TL;DR

This paper discusses the potential of self-sovereign digital identities to enhance privacy, portability, and user control in the digital revolution, addressing limitations of traditional centralized identity systems.

Contribution

It analyzes the opportunities and challenges of implementing self-sovereign identities, highlighting their potential to transform digital identity management.

Findings

Self-sovereign identities improve user control over digital data.

They enable seamless data portability across services.

Challenges include technical, legal, and adoption barriers.

Abstract

The interconnectedness of people, services and devices is a defining aspect of the digital revolution, and, secure digital identities are an important prerequisite for secure and legally compliant information exchange. Existing approaches to realize a secure identity management focus on central providers of identities such as national authorities or online service providers. Hence, changing residence or service provider often means to start over and creating new identities, because procedures for data portability are missing. Self-sovereign digital identities are instead created and managed by individuals, and enable them to maintain their digital identities independent from residence, national eID infrastructure and market-dominating service providers.