Self-Sovereign-Identity as a Service: Trusted computation offloading for IoT constrained devices

Digital identity makes IoT objects unique and distinguishes them from each other. Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) aims to provide a digital identity that is both verified and verifiable to IoT objects while building a digital ecosystem for secure interactions between heterogeneous objects. However, in many real-world use cases, IoT devices cannot run natively a full self-sovereign identity stack implementation, due to hardware and software constraints. For this reason, an edge device has been designed with the capability of securely aiding constrained devices to create and manage their own identity according to the SSI paradigm. The software has been developed using Keystone, an open-source framework for building Trusted Execution Environments, for establishing a trusted communication channel between the IoT device and the edge device that handles offloaded operations. By defining a new paradigm called Self-Sovereign Identity as a Service, constrained devices can exploit the full SSI stack on demand. Such a solution has the advantage to increase the number of devices that can interact in a secure digital ecosystem of this kind by shifting the computational operations onto more powerful edge devices.