Editorial: Establishing Self Sovereign Identity with Blockchain
Alan Sherriff, Kaliya “Identity Woman” Young, Michael Shea · Frontiers in Blockchain · 2022
Establishing Self Sovereign Identity with BlockchainDigital identity is a divisive topic.This is especially true of the Self-Sovereign Identity systems and standards being established today using decentralized architectures with blockchain technology foundations.Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) places individuals in control of their personal information; practitioners draw an analogy with physical wallets because a collection of digital identity credentials held in an SSI digital wallet are used within the digital realm in a similar way to paper and plastic credentials used in everyday life.Fundamentally, the SSI approach serves to wrest control of digital identity from long-established centralized systems and authorities, democratizing and helping to rebalance the distribution of online power between individuals and institutions.SSI represents a paradigm shift in the way digital identity is commonly managed and controlled today, presenting a serious alternative to many existing business models.This could provoke vested interests and opposition from global institutions and political structures that rely on their centralized digital identity infrastructures.This Research Topic aims to provide a rich resource for identity practitioners, researchers, technologists, adopters, and policymakers to understand and advance the subject of SSI.While there is a wealth of publicly available material, this Research Topic provides the rigor of community peer review and the trust and confidence that this engenders.The editors set out to curate a wide-ranging Research Topic of new academic research coupled with real-world experience and in-depth knowledge on the realities of implementing SSI.The topic brings together diverse perspectives from authors and reviewers invited from academia and industry, drawn from 12 countries and four continents, reviewed over a 2-year span.Several contributors have devoted their careers to SSI and been instrumental in driving SSI to where it is today, on the foothills of widescale adoption.The 2-year curation period unintentionally incorporated the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic that hastened the use of online services, bringing debates around decentralized vs. centralized systems into the mainstream media.The pandemic created an unplanned pause in progress on this topic as most contributors were affected and many turned their energy to applying SSI technologies to the public health crisis, forming global collaboratives focused on helping global trade and travel to restart safely using privacy-preserving health credentials.Several papers were delayed and then revised in this light.A common thread binding this topic together is the open standards that have emerged from the global SSI community.The Verifiable Credentials Data Model is now a W3C recommended standard.Coupled with Decentralized Identifiers (DID), these standards can ensure