Anonymous Credentials and Self-Sovereign Identity - An Initial Assessment

Privacy-enhancing authentication allows the use of a service requiring authentication while protecting privacy. Two main research lines try to achieve the trade-off between authentication and privacy: Anonymous Credentials and Self-Sovereign Identity. Anonymous Credentials are a cryptographic protocol closely related to group signatures and identity escrow schemes with several available implementations. Self-Sovereign Identity is a collection of primitives focusing on the users’ control over their digital identity with a strong push towards practicability in the form of W3C Verifiable Credentials. Both concepts are rarely compared despite their similar settings and use cases. This work provides an analysis of the current intersection between the two research fields.