Self-Sovereign Identity

Our activities around Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) aim to provide the fundamentals (protocols, cryptography, software) so that individuals can authenticate themselves in the digital world securely and in a privacy-respectful manner. Our contributions span the entire stack, from user digital wallets to back-end and DLT, and include theoretical (e.g. cryptographic protocols) as well as software stack contributions (e.g. code developed in the context of open-source projects).

The Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) paradigm details the interactions between the end user and the issuer on the one hand, and the verifier on the other. Self-sovereignty implies that the user is in full possession of their credentials, and can show them at will to whichever verifier without having to consult the issuing entity. SSI is thus the authentication paradigm of the decentralized world, additionally enabling privacy-preserving interactions which cannot be delivered by other authentication approaches.

Our activities in this space focus on two main directions: software stack enhancement and cryptographic protocol extensions. Concerning the former, we work towards building a universal wallet that supports arbitrary digital credential types based on evolving standards; crucially, said wallet should cater for both identity use-cases as well as tokenised asset ones.

On the cryptographic side, our work starts from existing and well-established protocols and standards, extending those (e.g. to combine them with biometric authentication, or to introduce auditability) and deploying them efficiently for all use-cases. In particular, our ambition is to provide a single crypto protocol suite that can be rolled out in various use-cases, with specific focus on its usability in the permissioned tokenized asset space.