ELMO2EDS: Transforming Educational Credentials into Self-Sovereign Identity Paradigm

TL;DR

This paper introduces ELMO2EDS, a novel approach that integrates digital educational credentials into the Self-Sovereign Identity ecosystem, enhancing student authentication and credential management.

Contribution

It proposes a method to convert EMREX credentials into Self-Sovereign Identity format and improves authentication and verification processes.

Findings

ELMO2EDS successfully converts credentials to SSI format.

The solution enhances student authentication and credential verification.

It addresses issues in existing academic credential networks.

Abstract

Digital credentials in education make it easier for students to apply for a course of study, a new job, or change a higher education institute. Academic networks, such as EMREX, support the exchange of digital credentials between students and education institutes. Students can fetch results from one educational institute and apply for a course of study at another educational institute. Digital signatures of the issuing institution can verify the authenticity of digital credentials. Each institution must provide the integration of EMREX using its identity management system. In this paper, we investigate how digital credentials can be integrated into the Self-Sovereign Identity ecosystem to overcome the known issues of academic networks. We examine known issues such as the authentication of students. Self-Sovereign Identity is a paradigm that gives individuals control of their digital identities. Based on our findings, we propose ELMO2EDS, a solution that 1) converts digital credentials from EMREX to a suitable Self-Sovereign Identy data format, 2) enables authenticating a student, and 3) enables issuing, storing, and verification of achieved study.