The Guardianship in Decentralized Identity Management

RESERVED

Not all individuals can be entrusted to self-manage their sensitive identity data and credentials and decide when and with whom to share which data [1]. The sophisticated and demanding key management system is frequently disadvantageous to various social groups, such as the elderly and disabled [2]. Therefore, there should be a mechanism to determine whether a user should have complete control over their identity data, based on some external factors (e.g., medical conditions, age). However, this issue is left unaddressed in today’s research. There is no discussion on whether such a mechanism would undermine the principles of a Self-Sovereign identity (SSI), and whether such a beneficiary role is technically and conceptually feasible. A popular SSI system Sovrin has a concept of a “guardian”, that addresses this issue by “handling an identity on behalf of a vulnerable person or anyone else incapable of managing their digital wallet“ [3]. However, the authors did not provide a detailed discussion on how this is achieved in the mentioned solution. QuarkID framework recognizes this challenge in their whitepaper [4]. However, the only relevant document QuarkID refers to is the Sovrin Foundation's concept of guardianship.

This thesis investigates the concept of guardianship within decentralized identity and SSI systems, examines how this notion fits within SSI principles, develops necessary functional requirements (FRs) for the component, and designs a guardian component for an SSI system.

References:

[1]  L. Weigl, T. Barbereau, A. Rieger, G. Fridgen, “The Social Construction of Self-Sovereign Identity: An Extended Model of Interpretive Flexibility”, Proceedings of the 55th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS, 2022. URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/79649.

[2] M. Cheesman, “Self-Sovereignty for Refugees? The Contested Horizons of Digital Identity”, Geopolitics 27 (2022) 134–159. DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2020.1823836. 

[3] M. Shuaib, N. H. Hassan, S. Usman, S. Alam, S. Bhatia, A. Mashat, A. Kumar, M. Kumar, “Self-Sovereign Identity Solution for Blockchain-Based Land Registry System: A Comparison”, Mobile Information Systems 2022 (2022) e8930472. Publisher: Hindawi. DOI: 10.1155/2022/8930472.