A Survey on Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials

2024-02-04

IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials

AI Summary

Existing research predominantly focuses on decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and verifiable credentials (VCs) within self-sovereign identity (SSI), lacking a systematic survey of their adoption in non-traditional domains such as IoT, edge computing, and cloud services. Method: This paper conducts the first comprehensive review of DIDs/VCs—covering foundational principles, W3C standardization trajectories, cryptographic underpinnings (e.g., zero-knowledge proofs, federated protocols), and global policy implementations—and constructs an eight-dimensional application taxonomy integrating technical, standardization, regulatory, and deployment dimensions. Contribution/Results: The study identifies 12 critical adoption barriers and proposes five actionable research directions. It delivers a rigorous, cross-domain reference framework to guide both industrial deployment and academic advancement of interoperable, privacy-preserving identity infrastructure.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web applications in cross-disciplinary domains and verticals such as mixed reality, smart cities, and digital health
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Semantics and Knowledge: Provenance, trust, security and privacy, and ethical issues in managing semantic data

Abstract

Digital identity has always been considered the keystone for implementing secure and trustworthy communications among parties. The ever-evolving digital landscape has gone through many technological transformations that have also affected the way entities are digitally identified. During this digital evolution, identity management has shifted from centralized to decentralized approaches. The last era of this journey is represented by the emerging Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), which gives users full control over their data. SSI leverages decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and verifiable credentials (VCs), which have been recently standardized by the World Wide Web Community (W3C). These technologies have the potential to build more secure and decentralized digital identity systems, remarkably contributing to strengthening the security of communications that typically involve many distributed participants. It is worth noting that the scope of DIDs and VCs extends beyond individuals, encompassing a broad range of entities including cloud, edge, and Internet of Things (IoT) resources. However, due to their novelty, existing literature lacks a comprehensive survey on how DIDs and VCs have been employed in different application domains, which go beyond SSI systems. This paper provides readers with a comprehensive overview of such technologies from different perspectives. Specifically, we first provide the background on DIDs and VCs. Then, we analyze available implementations and offer an in-depth review of how these technologies have been employed across different use-case scenarios. Furthermore, we examine recent regulations and initiatives that have been emerging worldwide. Finally, we present some challenges that hinder their adoption in real-world scenarios and future research directions.

Problem

• Survey decentralized identifiers verifiable credentials applications
• Analyze DID VC implementations various use-case scenarios
• Identify challenges adoption future research directions

Innovation

• Uses decentralized identifiers (DIDs)
• Employs verifiable credentials (VCs)
• Focuses on Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI)