Rethinking Decentralised Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials for the Internet of Things

Abstract

In digital era of Internet of Things (IoT), internet-connected devices are becoming smart and autonomous. In this distributed world IoT device operate not only with the owner of the device but also need to operate with third parties, which leads to have identification for each IoT device. In the coming years, deploying IoT solutions at large scale will have to address complex issues of managing digital identity, security and identity ownership. Most of the current IoT solutions rely upon centralized client-server mechanism for providing connectivity and access to devices and services. However, when billions of devices will begin connecting simultaneously, then existing centralized solution will not suffice. Now days, we rely on federated identities however in this user need to depend on third party as users are not owner of their own identity, this leads to have Self-Sovereign Identities (SSI). In the sequel, there is a need of decentralized method for managing identities in near future. In this chapter, various identification methods are analyzed. Further, Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials are discussed, the discussion focus on whether DID and VC are applicable to the IoT as IoT includes resource constrained devices at base level. It also presents smart home use case utilizing DID and VCs in order to evaluate its applicability. In the same line threat analysis is presented to analyze applicability of the DID and VC for the IoT applications.