Self-Sovereign Identity: Privacy, Key Management, and Decentralized Access Control

Self-Sovereign Identity: Privacy, Key Management, and Decentralized Access Control presents a focused technical examination of digital identity architectures that place individuals and organizations at the center of identity management. The book explores self-sovereign identity as an approach to managing digital credentials, identifiers, authentication, authorization, and access without relying exclusively on centralized identity providers. It examines the relationship between identity ownership, privacy protection, cryptographic key management, and decentralized access control within modern digital systems.The discussion addresses fundamental concepts associated with decentralized identity, including digital identifiers, verifiable credentials, identity wallets, cryptographic keys, authentication mechanisms, authorization policies, credential presentation, and trust relationships. Particular attention is given to key management because the security and usability of decentralized identity systems depend heavily on the secure creation, storage, protection, rotation, recovery, and use of cryptographic keys. The book also considers privacy as a core design requirement, including the controlled disclosure of identity information and the reduction of unnecessary exposure of personal data.Decentralized access control provides another central theme. The book examines how authorization decisions can be structured when identity information and credentials are distributed across different entities and systems. This perspective connects self-sovereign identity with broader topics in cybersecurity, information security, distributed systems, cryptography, authentication, and identity and access management.