Towards Public Blockchain for Self-Sovereign Identities – BC4SSI

Identity is the foundation of trust. Managing digital identities might be complex and it is usually managed in a centralized way. However, centralized approaches are prone to failures may allow censorship. Self-sovereign identities (SSI) refer to digital identities managed in a decentralized way. Users self-manage their identities without relying on third-party providers. At each interaction between a user and a service, a proof is generated and stored so as to be able to verify and reuse the given proof later. Storage of these verifiable claims must be fully decentralized as well to avoid failures and censorship. Public blockchains are a strong candidate to deploy SSI and store verifiable claims. However, current public blockchain design suffer from various limitations preventing the deployment of SSI.The BC4SSI project will focus on the following scientific locks: alternatives to Proof-of-work security proofs, lightweight replication, scalability and energy consumption, so as to allow the use of SSI by anyone with a classical smartphone in everyday services. The project will last 48 months.