Applying Self-Sovereign Identity to Constrained Internet of Things - A Systematic Review
Benedito Alberto Macedo, Fabio Wladimir M Maia, Tiago G. F. Barros, Milton V. M. Lima, Carlos Andre Guimaraes Ferraz, Ioram Schechtman Sette · 2025
One of the foundations of security is digital identity management, which consists of managing and protecting the identities of individuals, devices, and organizations. Centralized identity management models present several problems regarding data protection, confidentiality, and privacy. The Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) model emerged with the proposal for decentralized digital identity management based on decentralized identifiers (DID) and verified credentials (VC), with cryptographic proofs that increase the level of security but demand a significant computational load. This computational load is one of the obstacles to its implementation in the constrained Internet of Things (IoT) because it has low computational resources. This study aims to understand the challenges of applying SSI to the constrained IoT through a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS). The results showed that although there is a limited number of identified articles, research has grown in the last six years, with more than half of the studies published in the last two years. Most challenges were identified in authentication capability, although some other related to authorization, data protection, key management, interoperability, and privacy were also highlighted.