A Truly Self-Sovereign Identity System

TL;DR

This paper presents TCID, a self-sovereign identity system that addresses network-level privacy to ensure user control, credibility, and anonymity, demonstrating practical latency levels despite increased network anonymization overhead.

Contribution

The paper introduces TCID, a comprehensive SSI system with network-level privacy features, filling a gap in existing SSI research focused mainly on data disclosure protocols.

Findings

Network-level anonymization incurs higher latency but remains practical.

TCID satisfies seven key functional requirements for SSI.

Current SSI research overlooks network-level privacy considerations.

Abstract

Existing digital identity management systems fail to deliver the desirable properties of control by the users of their own identity data, credibility of disclosed identity data, and network-level anonymity. The recently proposed Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) approach promises to give users these properties. However, we argue that without addressing privacy at the network level, SSI systems cannot deliver on this promise. In this paper we present the design and analysis of our solution TCID, created in collaboration with the Dutch government. TCID is a system consisting of a set of components that together satisfy seven functional requirements to guarantee the desirable system properties. We show that the latency incurred by network-level anonymization in TCID is significantly larger than that of identity data disclosure protocols but is still low enough for practical situations. We conclude that current research on SSI is too narrowly focused on these data disclosure protocols.