Bottom-up Trust Registry in Self Sovereign Identity

TL;DR

This paper proposes a trust registry design for self sovereign identity systems that incorporates human trust and incentivization mechanisms to ensure verifiers can trust credential issuers.

Contribution

It introduces a novel trust registry framework with incentivization to enhance trustworthiness and stakeholder participation in self sovereign identity.

Findings

Trust registry design improves credential verification trustworthiness.

Incentivization motivates honest participation.

Framework supports decentralized credential management.

Abstract

Self sovereign identity is a form of decentralised credential management. During credential verification, data exchange only happens between the data owner and the verifier without passing through any third parties. While this approach offers a privacy-centric solution, it poses a challenge. How do verifiers trust that the credential is vouched by a trusted source? More specifically, how do verifiers know that the issuer has the reputation or is authorised to issue the credential? In this paper, we propose a trust registry design that handles the aspect of human trust in self sovereign identity. We also introduce an incentivisation mechanism for the trust registry in order to motivate each stakeholder to participate actively and honestly.