Decentralized and Self-Sovereign Identity: Systematic Mapping Study

Self-Sovereign Identity is an emerging, user-centric, decentralized identity approach utilizing some form of decentralized technology. It provides a means for digital identification without reliance on any external authority, enabling entities to control their identity and data flow during digital interactions while enhancing security and privacy. With the rise of blockchain technology, Self-Sovereign Identity is gathering momentum in academia and industry while the number of research papers increases rapidly. However, Self-Sovereign Identity is still a young unstructured field in its early stages of research. Thus, a systematic mapping methodology was adopted to provide a coarse-grained overview of decentralized and Self-Sovereign Identity and structure the research area by identifying, analyzing, and classifying the research papers according to predefined parameters, which is to say according to their contribution, application domain, IT field, research type, research method, and place of publication. Furthermore, the nature and scope of the research were determined, while existing research topics, gained insights into trends, demographics, challenges, gaps, and opportunities for future research were also presented. The results suggest that validation research and solution proposals prevail, addressing decentralized identity in a general matter. Papers mainly propose systems/solutions, architectures, and frameworks, focusing on authentication, security, privacy, and trust, while there are hardly any studies researching usability, user experience, patterns, and good practices.