Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI)

Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) is a model and movement in digital identity that places the individual at the centre of identity management. Under SSI principles, individuals create, own, and control their identity credentials without depending on any single centralised authority or intermediary. The core tenets of SSI include user control and consent, minimal disclosure, portability, and interoperability.

Technically, SSI ecosystems typically rely on Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), Verifiable Credentials (VCs), and distributed ledger or peer-to-peer technologies to enable trust without centralised identity providers. The relationship between SSI and eIDAS 2.0 is complex and often debated.

On one hand, the EUDIW embodies several SSI principles: it gives holders control over their data, supports selective disclosure, and enables privacy-preserving interactions with relying parties. The wallet architecture follows the issuer-holder-verifier triangle that is central to SSI. On the other hand, the eIDAS 2.

0 framework is fundamentally anchored in government-issued identity (PID) and a regulated trust model (QTSPs, Trusted Lists, supervisory bodies), which departs from the fully decentralised, authority-independent vision of pure SSI. The ARF has also chosen specific credential formats (SD-JWT, mdoc) and protocols (OpenID4VC) over more SSI-native technologies (like DIDComm or W3C VC Data Model with JSON-LD). Some in the SSI community view eIDAS 2.

0 as a pragmatic implementation of SSI principles within a regulatory context, while others see it as a parallel but distinct approach. For organisations, understanding SSI provides valuable context for the design philosophy behind the EUDIW, even if the specific technology choices differ from a pure SSI stack.