Open Access

Charan Annadurai, Axel Sikora, Dominik Welte

• Traditional authentication involves sharing a considerable amount of personal and identifying information. Usually, a single central authority controls the data of all their users. This creates a single point of failure and users typically have to relinquish control over their data. Therefore it is important to explore alternate authentication mechanisms to uphold data sovereignty. DataTraditional authentication involves sharing a considerable amount of personal and identifying information. Usually, a single central authority controls the data of all their users. This creates a single point of failure and users typically have to relinquish control over their data. Therefore it is important to explore alternate authentication mechanisms to uphold data sovereignty. Data sovereignty describes forms of independence, control, and autonomy over digital data. Enforcing data sovereignty also requires independence from central authorities. This paper explores alternate decentralized authentication methods. It leverages Verifiable Credentials (VCs) which allow verification without needing to contact the issuer and self-sovereign identities in the form of Decentralized IDentifiers (DIDs). This paper aims to leverage the decentralized authentication supported by VCs and DIDs and provide two use cases that might explain how they could be used.…