A Survey of Self-Sovereign Identity Ecosystem

TL;DR

This survey comprehensively reviews the evolution, components, and challenges of self-sovereign identity, highlighting current research, platforms, and regulatory frameworks in this emerging digital identity paradigm.

Contribution

It provides a detailed overview of self-sovereign identity, including its foundational building blocks, current initiatives, and identifies key challenges and future research directions.

Findings

Identifies core components like decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials.

Summarizes existing platforms, projects, and regulatory frameworks.

Highlights key challenges and opportunities for future research.

Abstract

Self-sovereign identity is the next evolution of identity management models. This survey takes a journey through the origin of identity, defining digital identity and progressive iterations of digital identity models leading up to self-sovereign identity. It then states the relevant research initiatives, platforms, projects, and regulatory frameworks, as well as the building blocks including decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials, distributed ledger, and various privacy engineering protocols. Finally, the survey provides an overview of the key challenges and research opportunities around self-sovereign identity.