Modelo para la gestión de una identidad digital descentralizada y autogobernada bajo tecnología de registro distribuido

Abstract

Digital identity is conceived as a fundamental human right; therefore, it should facilitate an individual’s timely access to goods and services, control over their privacy, and mitigation of impersonation risks. Moreover, it is crucial for the economic, political, and social development of a country and its citizens. Every person should be capable of proving, managing, and preserving their digital identity without access barriers and with the autonomy to manage their personal identity attributes. On the other hand, the Internet has evolved without a digital identity layer, compelling each web service or application to implement an identification scheme, generally based on username-password access credentials. This obliges users to remember and manage multiple passwords and utilize various validation methods. Within this context, digital identity management is one of the significant challenges associated with large-scale digital infrastructures in contemporary society. It is a complex problem, as individuals’ information is currently stored in a dispersed manner, with storage and custody by third parties and authentication attributes associated with public personal or biometric data. Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) supported by distributed ledger technology provides the necessary digital identity layer in the current web and enables an entity to create, own, and control a verifiable and persistent identity in a user-centric data ecosystem. This research project proposes an SSI model called Aletheia, which provides a verifiable representation of digital identity resistant to manipulation due to the availability of a distributed ledger. This model preserves user privacy and control of personal identification attributes through the im- plementation of decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials, along with the integration of a decentralized storage system with an additional document encryption method. Aletheia was compared with a set of SSI frameworks by analyzing its adherence to digital identity principles, and due to its nature, it demonstrated notable compliance in persistence, protection, access, portability, and interoperability. Additionally, a proof of concept was implemented to enable the creation of decentralized identities with secure and protected storage of verifiable credentials, fully under the control of the identity rights holder. This proof of concept allows users to manage their credentials and perform verifiable presentations within an environment that ensures privacy preservation. It facilitates a comprehensive analysis of the information flow within the model, encompassing the entire process from the creation of the digital wallet, the request and issuance of a credential, and its subsequent storage, to the presentation of the credential to a verifier, culminating in cryptographic verification by this.