Methods for Decentralized Identities: Evaluation and Insights

Recent technological shifts have pressured businesses to reshape the way they operate and transact. At the hart of this restructuring, identity management established itself as an essential building block in both B2C and B2B business models. Trustworthy identities may refer to customers, businesses, suppliers or assets, and enable trusted communications between different actors. Unfortunately, traditional identity management systems rely on centralized architectures and trust in third party services. With the inception of blockchain technology, new methods for managing identity emerged, which promise better decentralization and self-sovereignty. This paper provides an evaluation of a selection of distributed identity methods, and analyzes their properties based on the categorization specified in the W3C recommendation rubric.