A Survey on Blockchain-based Identity Management and Decentralized Privacy for Personal Data

Abstract

In the digital revolution, even secure communication between individuals, services and devices through centralized digital entities presents considerable risks. Service providers collect and store information that is used for data mining, profiling and exploitation without users' knowledge or consent. Having service providers continue to offer their centric solutions is inefficient in terms of duplication, has serious security lacunae and is cumbersome to the users. The Self-sovereign Identity (SSI) concept, which includes the individual's consolidated digital identity and verified attributes, enables the users of data to exert their ownership and gain insights from their data's usage. The authentication and verification of digital identity is essential to achieve the privacy and security of distributed digital identities. However, the current literature still lacks the comprehensive study on components of identity management as well as user privacy and data protection mechanisms in identity management architecture. In this paper, we provide a coherent view of the central concepts of SSI, including the components of identity proofing and authentication solutions for different SSI solutions. Firstly, we discussed an overview of Identity management approaches, introducing an architecture overview as well as the relevant actors in such a system and blockchain technology as solution for distributed user-centric identity. Then we analyzed the authentication and verification mechanisms in the context of digital identity. Finally, we discuss the existing solutions and point out the research gaps and elaborate challenges and trade-offs towards building a complete identity management system (IdMs).

Self-Sovereign Identity: A Systematic Review, Mapping and Taxonomy

“…However, while blockchain assists the development of SSI solutions, it is not a requirement [6,8,84,148]. Nonetheless, existing reviews claim that SSI necessarily needs blockchain to be implemented [32,48,71,78,83,86,102,162]. With regards to the review methodology of these works, two surveys provided details about their search strategy [78,86] while six did not [32,48,71,83,102,162].…”

“…Nonetheless, existing reviews claim that SSI necessarily needs blockchain to be implemented [32,48,71,78,83,86,102,162]. With regards to the review methodology of these works, two surveys provided details about their search strategy [78,86] while six did not [32,48,71,83,102,162]. Next, we present the existing secondary studies in the field of SSI.…”

“…Three surveys that do not specify a search method have produced similar outputs despite the comparison of the underlying infrastructure of blockchain-based SSI offerings [48,71,83]. They all highlighted what blockchain framework the surveyed work use, the type of the blockchain network (i.e.…”

“…Kaneriya and Patel [71] reviewed 6 SSI systems, enumerating future enhancements that, according to the authors, each system should focus on. Lastly, Gilani et al [48] reviewed 8 SSI offerings, detailing which support selective disclosure of personal information, how cryptographic keys are managed, and blockchain-specific details such as whether credentials are stored either on or off ledger and the usage of smart contracts. Smart contracts are a piece of software that runs on the ledger automatically and transparently for everyone to verify [160].…”

Identity and access management using distributed ledger technology: A survey

“…On the other hand, non-repudiation can remove the possibility of access deny and traceability guarantees the possibility of tracking the user actions in the system. Besides the benefits of Blockchain for IAM solutions, there are several challenges which demand prime attention, 14,15 which are mainly user's privacy and system latency.…”