Self-sovereign Identity $-$ Opportunities and Challenges for the Digital Revolution

The interconnectedness of people, services and devices is a defining aspect of the digital revolution, and, secure digital identities are an important prerequisite for secure and legally compliant information exchange. Existing approaches to realize a secure identity management focus on central providers of identities such as national authorities or online service providers. Hence, changing residence or service provider often means to start over and creating new identities, because procedures for data portability are missing. Self-sovereign digital identities are instead created and managed by individuals, and enable them to maintain their digital identities independent from residence, national eID infrastructure and market-dominating service providers.