A Taxonomic Approach to Understanding Emerging Blockchain Identity Management Systems
This work provides a structured framework for understanding blockchain identity systems, which could benefit users and businesses, but it is incremental as it focuses on categorization rather than novel solutions.
The paper tackles the problem of categorizing emerging blockchain-based identity management systems, which aim to address issues like single points of failure and privacy concerns in traditional systems, by developing a taxonomy based on blockchain architectures, governance models, and other features.
Identity management systems (IDMSs) are widely used to provision user identities while managing authentication, authorization, and data sharing within organizations and on the web. Traditional identity systems typically suffer from single points of failure, lack of interoperability, and privacy issues, such as enabling mass data collection and user tracking. Blockchain technology has the potential to alleviate these concerns: it can support the ability for users to control the custody of their own identifiers and credentials, enabling novel data ownership and governance models with built-in control and consent mechanisms. Hence, blockchain-based IDMSs, which could benefit both users and businesses, are beginning to proliferate. This work categorizes these systems into a taxonomy based on differences in blockchain architectures, governance models, and other salient features. Context is provided for the taxonomy through the description of related terms, emerging standards, and use cases while highlighting relevant security and privacy considerations.