Integrating Blockchain and Self-Sovereign Identity for Secure, Scalable, and User-Controlled Digital Identity Systems

Abstract

The centralized nature of the existing digital identity infrastructure provides single points of failure and potential breaches of user privacy. This work proposes a decentralized infrastructure for managing digital identities using a permissioned blockchain and W3C-compliant Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials together with zero-knowledge proofs to support a user-controlled and privacy-preserving identity verification process. The experiment verifies the ability of the proposed infrastructure to handle up to 155 transactions in the verification process in 105 ms for a maximum of 500,000 users without the possibility of egress operations as a potential threat to perform unauthorized access to the personal user information. User test participants are satisfied with the design of the wallet interface and the management of the corresponding consents. Process analysis indicates the feasibility of the designed infrastructure in complying with the key principles of the GDPR and CCPA regulations.