In recent times, with the advent of blockchain technology, there is an optimism surrounding the concept of self-sovereign identity which is regarded to have an influential effect on how we interact with each other over the Internet in future. There are a few works in the literature which examine different aspects of self-sovereign identity. Unfortunately, the existing works are not methodological and comprehensive at all. Moreover, there exist different notions of what the term self-sovereign identity means. To exploit its full potential, it is essential to ensure a common understanding in a formal way. This paper aims to achieve this goal by providing the first-ever formal and rigorous treatment of the concept of self-sovereign identity using a mathematical model. This paper examines the properties that a self-sovereign identity should have and explores the impact of self-sovereign identity over the laws of identity. It also highlights the essential life-cycles of an identity management system and inter-relates how the notion of self-sovereign identity can be applied in these life-cycles. In addition, the paper illustrates several envisioned flows involving a self-sovereign identity leveraging blockchain technology covering different aspects of an identity management system. All in all, this paper presents the first formal and comprehensive step toward an academic investigation of self-sovereign identity.INDEX TERMS Identity, identity management system, self-sovereign identity, blockchain.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has extended the internet connectivity to reach not just computers and humans, but most of our environment things. The IoT has the potential to connect billions of objects simultaneously which has the impact of improving information sharing needs that result in improving our life. Although the IoT benefits are unlimited, there are many challenges facing adopting the IoT in the real world due to its centralized server/client model. For instance, scalability and security issues that arise due to the excessive numbers of IoT objects in the network. The server/client model requires all devices to be connected and authenticated through the server, which creates a single point of failure. Therefore, moving the IoT system into the decentralized path may be the right decision. One of the popular decentralization systems is blockchain. The Blockchain is a powerful technology that decentralizes computation and management processes which can solve many of IoT issues, especially security. This paper provides an overview of the integration of the blockchain with the IoT with highlighting the integration benefits and challenges. The future research directions of blockchain with IoT are also discussed. We conclude that the combination of blockchain and IoT can provide a powerful approach which can significantly pave the way for new business models and distributed applications.
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