SSI4IoT: Unlocking the Potential of IoT Tailored Self-Sovereign Identity

TL;DR

This paper addresses the gap in applying Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) to IoT by introducing a design matrix and taxonomy for IoT-specific Verifiable Credentials (VCs), detailing issuer roles (manufacturers, regulators, service providers, owners), and outlining concrete IoT VC use cases (identity, ownership, communication, capabilities, configurations, onboarding). It analyzes VC lifecycle management in IoT, explores delegation strategies for resource-constrained devices, and proposes optimization techniques such as CBOR encoding and IoT-friendly protocols (CoAP, MQTT, DIDComm) to reduce overhead. The work emphasizes privacy, interoperability, and scalable deployment, and discusses challenges like onboarding, regulatory alignment, and ledger performance, offering a practical pathway toward widespread SSI adoption in IoT. Overall, the paper contributes a structured framework for designing, issuing, and managing IoT-focused VCs and presents actionable optimizations to enable efficient, private, and scalable SSI-enabled IoT ecosystems.

Abstract

The emerging Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) techniques, such as Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs), move control of digital identity from conventional identity providers to individuals and lay down the foundation for people, organizations, and things establishing rich digital relationship. The existing applications of SSI mainly focus on creating person-to-person and person-to-service relationships, whereas person-to-device and device-to-device interactions have been largely overlooked. In this paper, we close this gap by identifying a number of key challenges of applying SSI to the Internet of Things (IoT) and providing a comprehensive taxonomy and usage of VCs in the IoT context with respect to their validity period, trust and interoperability level, and scope of usage. The life-cycle management of VCs as well as various optimization techniques for realizing SSI in IoT environments are also addressed in great detail. This work is a noteworthy step towards massive adoption of SSI for securing existing and future IoT applications in practice.

Figures (5)

• Figure 1: Three pillars of the SSI model
• Figure 2: High level view of the DID ecosystem
• Figure 3: High level architecture of the verifiable credential ecosystem
• Figure 4: Proposed design matrix to aid VC formation in IoT Context
• Figure 5: Verifiable credential life-cycle and its IoT aspect