A First Look at Identity Management Schemes on the Blockchain
Paul Dunphy, Fabien A.P. Petitcolas

TL;DR
This paper examines blockchain-based identity management schemes, evaluating three prominent proposals to assess their potential to improve decentralization, transparency, and user control in digital identity systems.
Contribution
It introduces the landscape of DLT-based IdM and provides an evaluation of three key proposals using a comprehensive analytical framework.
Findings
uPort shows strong decentralization features
Sovrin enhances user control and privacy
ShoCard offers a balance between security and usability
Abstract
The emergence of distributed ledger technology (DLT) based upon a blockchain data structure, has given rise to new approaches to identity management that aim to upend dominant approaches to providing and consuming digital identities. These new approaches to identity management (IdM) propose to enhance decentralisation, transparency and user control in transactions that involve identity information; but, given the historical challenge to design IdM, can these new DLT-based schemes deliver on their lofty goals? We introduce the emerging landscape of DLT-based IdM, and evaluate three representative proposals: uPort; ShoCard; and Sovrin; using the analytic lens of a seminal framework that characterises the nature of successful IdM schemes.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
