A lightweight trust management infrastructure for self-sovereign identity

Abstract

Decentralized approaches towards digital identity management, often summarized under the currently popular term Self-sovereign identity (SSI) are being associated with high hopes for a bright future of identity management (IdM). Numerous private, open source as well as publicly funded research initiatives pursue this approach with the aim to finally bring universally usable, trustworthy, interoperable, secure, and privacy friendly digital identities for everyone and all use cases. However, a major challenge that so far has been only rudimentary addressed, is the trust management in these decentralized identity ecosystems. This paper first elaborates this problem before presenting an approach for a trust management infrastructure in SSI ecosystems that is based on already completed work for trust management in digital transactions.