SoK: Self-Sovereign Digital Identities
Sushanth Ambati, Kainat Adeel, Jack Myers, Nikolay Ivanov

TL;DR
This paper provides a comprehensive survey of self-sovereign digital identities, highlighting key challenges, analyzing existing solutions, and outlining future research directions to facilitate broader adoption and understanding.
Contribution
It systematically categorizes challenges, reviews 80 sources, analyzes 47 publications, and catalogs 12 real-world SSDI applications, offering a structured overview of the field.
Findings
Most solutions focus on blockchain-based SSDI architectures.
Self-sovereignty exists on a spectrum, not as a binary property.
Identified six major challenges impeding adoption.
Abstract
Self-Sovereign Digital Identity (SSDI) enables individuals to control their own identity assertions and data, rather than relying on centralized or federated systems prone to large-scale data breaches. By eliminating centralized databases maintained by service providers and identity brokers, SSDIs offer enhanced security and privacy. However, adoption remains slow, and research in this area lacks systematization and uniformity. To address these gaps, we present a comprehensive systematization of knowledge on self-sovereign digital identities, with a primary focus on identifying the challenges that impede real-world adoption. We survey 80 academic and non-academic sources and identify six major challenges: (i) binding a single identity to one individual or organization, (ii) the absence of mature cryptographic and communication protocols, (iii) significant usability barriers, (iv)…
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Taxonomy
TopicsCryptography and Data Security · Blockchain Technology Applications and Security · Access Control and Trust
