A Novel Approach to Build Privacy and Trust in Vehicle Sales Using DID

Abstract

Decentralized identity solutions, built on the concept of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), have gained a competitive edge over existing identity management (IM) systems. This paper discusses the significance of decentralized identifier (DID) and verifiable credential (VC) in a peer-to-peer application for selling and managing pre-owned vehicles. The application uses Ethereum’s ERC-1056 lightweight DID standard. We aim to comply with the general data protection regulation (GDPR) requirements of the European Union. We propose implementing JSON Web Tokens (JWT) to store the user encoded information locally and a private interplanetary file system (IPFS) to maintain encrypted and encoded vehicle data information for improved privacy. Additionally, the ERC-721 standard is used to tokenize the vehicle to create the digital twin. Finally, we add the VC to the digital twin of the vehicle to increase the trust in the proposed model. The results demonstrate that our proposed solution offers more trust between the users and privacy of user and vehicle data. Furthermore, we also compute and compare the average cost of user DID creation using ERC-1056 and ERC-725, and the proposed solution is more cost-effective than the existing solutions.