With the advancement of technology and subsequently the age of digital information, online trustworthy identification has become increasingly more important. With respect to the various data breaches and privacy regulations, the current identity solutions are not fully optimized. In this paper, we will take a look at several Self-Sovereign Identity solutions which are already available. Some of them are built upon blockchain technology as this already provides decentralised persistent data and consensus. We will explore the emerging landscape of Self-Sovereign Identity solutions and dissect their implementations under multiple aspect criteria to determine the necessity of blockchain technology in this field. We conclude that blockchain technology is not explicitly required for a Self-Sovereign Identity solution but it is a good foundation to build up on, due to various technical advantages that the blockchain has to offer.
In by K. Cameron @cite_1 , seven laws are described that explain the successes and failures of digital identity systems. K. Cameron states that these laws are necessary to avoid any side-effects. The laws and their explanation are extensive and explain the requirements of solutions in detail. However, some of these laws can be more distinctive. The first law for example; could be split into and . Some implementations may satisfy one of these properties, but not the other.
@cite_1
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This paper is about how we can prevent the loss of trust and go forward to give Internet users a deep sense of safety, privacy, and certainty about whom they are relating to in cyberspace. Nothing could be more essential if Web-based services and applications are to continue to move beyond "cyber publication" and encompass all kinds of interaction and services. Our approach has been to develop a formal understanding of the dynamics causing digital identity systems to succeed or fail in various contexts, expressed as the Laws of Identity. Taken together, these laws define a unifying identity metasystem that can offer the Internet the identity layer it so obviously requires. Many security mechanisms are based on specific assumptions of identity and are vulnerable to attacks when these assumptions are violated. For example, impersonation is the well-known consequence when authenticating credentials are stolen by a third party. Another attack on identity occurs when credentials for one identity are purposely shared by multiple individuals, for example to avoid paying twice for a service. Such shared accounts are common in practice: friends exchange iTunes passwords to share purchased music; BugMeNot.com is a community that shares website registration passwords; and network address translation [29] devices allow multiple users to pay for a single IP address which is then shared among them. In this paper, we survey the impact of the Sybil attack [26], an attack against identity in which an individual entity masquerades as multiple simultaneous identities. The Sybil attack is a fundamental problem in many systems, and it has so far resisted a universally applicable solution. Many distributed applications and everyday services assume each participating entity controls exactly one identity. When this assumption is unverifiable or unmet, the sevice is subject to attack and the results of the application are questionable if not incorrect. A concrete example of this would be an online voting system where one person can vote using many online identities. Notably, this problem is currently only solved if a central authority, such as the administrator of a certificate authority, can guarantee that each person has a single identity represented by one key; in practice, this is very difficult to ensure on a large scale and would require costly manual attention. Digital identity is unsolved: after many years of research there is still no trusted communication over the Internet. To provide identity within the context of mutual distrust, this paper presents a blockchain-based digital identity solution. Without depending upon a single trusted third party, the proposed solution achieves passport-level legally valid identity. This solution for making identities Self-Sovereign, builds on a generic provable claim model for which attestations of truth from third parties need to be collected. The claim model is then shown to be both blockchain structure and proof method agnostic. Four different implementations in support of these two claim model properties are shown to offer sub-second performance for claim creation and claim verification. Through the properties of Self-Sovereign Identity, legally valid status and acceptable performance, our solution is considered to be fit for adoption by the general public. Unique identification and secure authentication of users are essential processes in numerous security-critical areas such as e-Government, e-Banking, or e-Business. Therefore, many countries (particularly in Europe) have implemented national eID solutions within the past years. Such implementations are typically based on smart cards holding some certified collection of citizen attributes and hence follow a client-side and user-centric approach. However, most of the implementations only support all-or-nothing disclosure of citizen attributes and thus do not allow privacy-friendly selective disclosure of attributes. Consequently, the complete identity of the citizen (all attributes) are always revealed to identity providers and or service providers, respectively. In this paper, we propose a novel user-centric identification and authentication model for eIDs, which supports selective attribute disclosure but only requires minimal changes in the existing eID architecture. In addition, our approach allows service providers to keep their infrastructure nearly untouched. Latter is often an inhibitor for the use of privacy-preserving cryptography like anonymous credentials in such architectures. Furthermore, our model can easily be deployed in the public cloud as we do not require full trust in identity providers. This fully features the Identity as a Service-paradigm while at the same time preserves citizens' privacy. We demonstrate the applicability of our model by adopting to the Austrian eID system to our approach.