Lifting the Veil of Credential Usage in Organizations: A Taxonomy

Abstract

With the emergence of self-sovereign identity (SSI) as a paradigm for digital identity management the handling of verifiable credentials (VCs) has become an important topic in organizations. Organizations process a wide variety of documents which can be considered credentials. Previous research shows that a challenge in developing SSI systems is a lack of understanding of the core aspects of the paradigm and their relation to existing organizational practices. Our research focuses on the different characteristics of credentials in organizations and maps the characteristics of VCs to physical credentials. Our findings indicate that credentials in organizations can be classified by ten dimensions. Additionally, VCs have many possible characteristics of physical credentials, althoughmplementation and support for certain features may be vendor-specific. Finally, we provide insights and suggestions for SSI researchers and developers.