Transition Pathways towards Design Principles of Self-Sovereign Identity

Society’s accelerating digital transformation during the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted clearly that the Internet lacks a secure, efficient, and privacy-oriented model for identity. Self-sovereign identity (SSI) aims to address core weaknesses of siloed and federated approaches to digital identity management from both users’ and service providers’ perspectives. SSI emerged as a niche concept in libertarian communities, and was initially strongly associated with blockchain technology. Later, when businesses and governments began to invest, it quickly evolved towards a mainstream concept. To investigate this evolution and its effects on SSI, we conduct design science research rooted in the theory of technological transition pathways. Our study identifies nine core design principles of SSI as deployed in relevant applications, and discusses associated competing political and socio-technical forces in this space. Our results shed light on SSI’s key characteristics, its development pathway, and tensions in the transition between regimes of digital identity management.