A Taxonomic Approach to Understanding Emerging Blockchain Identity Management Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a taxonomy of emerging blockchain-based identity management systems, categorizing them by architecture and governance to clarify their features, benefits, and security considerations.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive taxonomy of blockchain identity management systems, highlighting key architectural and governance differences and related security and privacy issues.

Findings

Classifies blockchain IDMSs into distinct categories based on architecture and governance

Provides insights into security and privacy considerations for different system types

Highlights emerging standards and use cases in blockchain identity management

Abstract

Identity management systems (IDMSs) are widely used to provision user identities while managing authentication, authorization, and data sharing within organizations and on the web. Traditional identity systems typically suffer from single points of failure, lack of interoperability, and privacy issues, such as enabling mass data collection and user tracking. Blockchain technology has the potential to alleviate these concerns: it can support the ability for users to control the custody of their own identifiers and credentials, enabling novel data ownership and governance models with built-in control and consent mechanisms. Hence, blockchain-based IDMSs, which could benefit both users and businesses, are beginning to proliferate. This work categorizes these systems into a taxonomy based on differences in blockchain architectures, governance models, and other salient features. Context is provided for the taxonomy through the description of related terms, emerging standards, and use cases while highlighting relevant security and privacy considerations.