TDID: Transparent and Efficient Decentralized Identity Management with Blockchain

Abstract

Decentralized identity (DID) is an identity management framework aiming to return the ownership of an identity to its corresponding user. Recent studies propose to store the identifiers of DID issuers and implement identity management systems based on blockchain. However, existing systems cannot avoid identity tampering and verifiable credential abuse of decentralized identities, which makes the identity management opaque. In this paper, we propose TDID, a Transparent and efficient Decentralized IDentity management system with blockchain. The key insight behind TDID is to manage the registration and authentication of DIDs via smart contracts, and design Structured Merkle Patricia Tree (SMPT) as an underlying data structure to store identity data on blockchain. The smart contract based processes can improve transparency of decentralized identity management, while the SMPT data structure can realize efficient storage of DID data. We implement and evaluate TDID on different identity management operations, and the experimental results show that TDID can achieve about 3.1 times for write operation and 6.3 times for read operation while improving the transparency of DID management.