DISC: Decentralized Identity System With Self-Sovereign Credential Aggregation
Yang Yang, Wai Keung Ching, Minming Huang, Supachate Innet, Guomin Yang, HweeHwa Pang, Robert Huijie Deng · IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security · 2025
The evolution of decentralized identity (DID) and self-sovereign identity (SSI) frameworks, as endorsed by W3C Verifiable Credentials (VC) and eIDAS 2.0, underscores the need for secure, efficient, and privacy-preserving credential management. However, existing credential systems often depend on centralized issuers, lack efficient aggregation mechanisms, or fail to ensure unlinkability across authentication sessions. To address these challenges, we propose DISC (Decentralized Identity System with Self-Sovereign Credential Aggregation), a novel credential system that enables multi-authority credential issuance, user-controlled credential aggregation, and unlinkable authentication. DISC allows users to aggregate credentials from multiple issuers while maintaining constant-size authentication tokens and supporting batch verification for scalable authentication. Additionally, DISC ensures unlinkability of aggregated authentication tokens, preventing verifiers from correlating sessions even when credentials share attributes. Security analysis proves DISC’s unforgeability, anonymity, and unlinkability, while experimental results confirm its efficiency in credential issuance, aggregation, and verification. Compared to existing schemes, DISC offers a scalable, privacy-preserving, and efficient decentralized identity solution, making it well-suited for real-world applications requiring secure and privacy-preserving identity verification.