Transition Pathways towards Design Principles of Self-Sovereign Identity

Society\u27s 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\u27 and service providers\u27 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\u27s key characteristics, its development pathway, and tensions in the transition between regimes of digital identity management

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 managemen

Identity management and e-learning standards for promoting the sharing of contents and services in higher education

In this paper, we present the status of identity management systems and e-learning standards across Europe, in order to promote the mobility and the sharing of contents and services in higher education institutions. With new requirements for authentication, authorization and identity management for Web applications, most higher education institutions implement several solutions to address these issues. At the first level, the adoption of directory Servers like LDAP, Active Directory and others, solve some problems of having multiple logins and passwords for authentication. The growing of Web applications like Learning management Systems, portals, Blogs, Wikis, and others, need a more effective way of identity management, providing security and accessibility. Web Single Sign-On (SSO) resolves some of these issues of identity management, because the authentication is managed centrally and the user can navigate through different Web applications using the same session. One example of a Web SSO system is the Central Authentication Systems (CAS). SSO systems provide an effective way to manage authentication and authorization inside institutions, but are restricted to the administrative domain of each institution. With the implementation of Bologna Process more students, lecturers and staff will be on mobility programs within European higher education institutions. The creation of identity management federations is mandatory to provide the mobility of users and to permit the exchange of contents and services between institutions. The creation of identities federations across Europe is been in discussion by TERENA (Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association) to provide a service federation like the EDUROAM WI-FI network that permits the mobility across Europe. This paper reports on some of the issues highlighted in the light of recent developments. To share contents and services within Europe, the adoption of standards is mandatory. IEEE LTSC (Learning Technology Standards Committee), IMS (IMS Global Learning, Inc) and ADL (Advanced Distributed Learning) are standards organizations that publish a set of standards to promote the interoperability, reusability and integration of e-learning contents and services. The most important standards that promote the sharing of contents and services across Europe are Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), IMS Digital Repositories Interoperability and IMS Learning Design. This paper presents the main features of e-learning standards and how it can be used in conjunction with identity management systems to create collaborative learning objects repositories to promote a more effective learning experience and a more competitive European space for higher education, with respect to the requirements of knowledge based societies

Identity in research infrastructure and scientific communication: Report from the 1st IRISC workshop, Helsinki Sep 12-13, 2011

Motivation for the IRISC workshop came from the observation that identity and digital identification are increasingly important factors in modern scientific research, especially with the now near-ubiquitous use of the Internet as a global medium for dissemination and debate of scientific knowledge and data, and as a platform for scientific collaborations and large-scale e-science activities.

The 1 1/2 day IRISC2011 workshop sought to explore a series of interrelated topics under two main themes: i) unambiguously identifying authors/creators & attributing their scholarly works, and ii) individual identification and access management in the context of identity federations. Specific aims of the workshop included:

• Raising overall awareness of key technical and non-technical challenges, opportunities and developments.
• Facilitating a dialogue, cross-pollination of ideas, collaboration and coordination between diverse – and largely unconnected – communities.
• Identifying & discussing existing/emerging technologies, best practices and requirements for researcher identification.

This report provides background information on key identification-related concepts & projects, describes workshop proceedings and summarizes key workshop findings