Bio-SSI: Self-Sovereign Identity Bound to Biometrics
Yoshiko Yasumura, Masakazu Fujio, Wataru Nakamura, Kenta Takahashi · 2024
In recent years, user's identities and credentials are used by many online services, and they are mostly managed by each service provider in a centralized manner. However, this centralized management has problems such as the users lacking direct control over their own identity. To solve such problems, a new approach to digital identity management called self-sovereign identity (SSI) is receiving attention globally. In SSI, each user controls and presents their own identity as needed by their own choice in a decentralized manner without relying on a central authority. There is, however, a problem that needs to be solved to realize true SSI. In the current implementations of SSI, users need to securely store their data, or a secret key for controlling them, in some way, and this is typically done by storing them in their own mobile device. This method, however, places the center of trust on the device rather than the user themselves and also excludes those who do not have a personal device from the system. In this paper, we propose Bio-SSI where user's data are bound to the user themselves through biometrics such that only the user who was verified and authenticated by biometrics can access and use their data while it is device-independent and available for all.