A Blockchain Self-Sovereign Identity for Open Banking Secured by the Customer’s Banking Cards

Abstract

Open finance is evolving and extending open banking. This creates a large context that implies a financial and identity data exchange paradigm, which faces challenges to balance customer experience, security, and the self-control over personal identity information. We propose Self-Sovereign Banking Identity (SSBI), a Blockchain-based self-sovereign identity (SSI) to secure private data sharing by utilizing trusted customer’s banking cards as a key storage and identity transaction-signing enclave. The design and implementation of the SSI framework is based on the Veramo SDK and Ethereum to overcome the limitation of signing curve availability on the current banking Java Cards needed for Hyperledger Indy. SSBI uses the elliptic curve SECP256K1 for transaction signing, which exists for several payment cards in the market. SSBI enables automated financial services and trust in the service provider communication. This work analyzes the flow and framework components, and evaluates the usability, integration, and performance in terms of throughput, latency, security, and complexity. Furthermore, the proposed approach is compared with related solutions. The presented prototype implementation is based on a test Ethereum network and signing transactions on the banking card. The preliminary results show that SSBI provides an effective solution for integrating the customer’s banking cards to secure open banking identity exchange. Furthermore, it allows the integration of several scenarios to support trusted open banking. The Blockchain layer settings need to be scaled and improved before real-world implementation.