The Concept of Self-sovereign Identity

The majority of Internet identities are centralized. They are owned and controlled by a single entity. The user does not own their identity record, and it can be taken away at any time. The deletion of an account effectively erases a person’s online identity they may have spent years cultivating and may be of significant value to them, and impossible to replace. Identity governance solutions with on-premises and cloud-based identity management software are deployed in enterprises as an integral component of employee on-boarding/off-boarding. Enterprise users use these credentials to access multiple internal and external enterprise applications such as Salesforce, Workday, and Office 365, etc.

Identity governance solutions aim to provide a service that ensures the right people have the right access to the right information at the right time. Most organizations work hard to ensure that their identity governance system reduces the burden on their users by providing a single sign-on experience so that once users have authenticated themselves, they don’t need to re-authenticate themselves to other systems during the same session. User-centric identity is most frequently manifested in the form of independent personal data stores at one end, and large social networks at the other end. It relies on the user to select an individual identity provider of their choice.

The problem remains in a mature personal data store ecosystem where relying parties need to integrate and accommodate many such identity providers to reach a wide customer base. In the history of mankind, there has never been a globally unique network identifier that an individual person can own and control during his lifetime. We need a new form of identifier designed to be controlled entirely by the identity owner without requiring any third party. Self-sovereign identity is a new type of digital identifier that has never existed before, one that requires no third-party service provider yet works across the entire Internet.

The concept of self-sovereign identity ensures individual control, security, and full portability. The individual is their own identity provider—there is no external party who can claim to provide the identity to them because it is intrinsically theirs. The user’s digital experience is independent of any organization. No one can take your self-sovereign identity away from you. This approach decentralizes credentials and pushes them in the hand of individual, where it is less economically valuable to hackers because it would require a lot of effort to hack individual identities one-by- one.