Self-Sovereign Identity Solutions: The Necessity of Blockchain Technology

TL;DR

This paper reviews Self-Sovereign Identity solutions, analyzing their implementations and arguing that blockchain technology, while not strictly necessary, offers valuable technical benefits for building decentralized identity systems.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of existing Self-Sovereign Identity solutions and evaluates the role of blockchain technology in their development.

Findings

Blockchain offers technical advantages for Self-Sovereign Identity solutions.

Blockchain is not strictly necessary but beneficial for decentralization.

Various implementations are analyzed under multiple criteria.

Abstract

With the advancement of technology and subsequently the age of digital information, online trustworthy identification has become increasingly more important. With respect to the various data breaches and privacy regulations, the current identity solutions are not fully optimized. In this paper, we will take a look at several Self-Sovereign Identity solutions which are already available. Some of them are built upon blockchain technology as this already provides decentralised persistent data and consensus. We will explore the emerging landscape of Self-Sovereign Identity solutions and dissect their implementations under multiple aspect criteria to determine the necessity of blockchain technology in this field. We conclude that blockchain technology is not explicitly required for a Self-Sovereign Identity solution but it is a good foundation to build up on, due to various technical advantages that the blockchain has to offer.