Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
11-2025
Abstract
The evolution of decentralized identity (DID) and self-sovereign identity (SSI) frameworks, as endorsed by W3C Verifiable Credentials (VC) and eIDAS 2.0, underscores the need for secure, efficient, and privacy-preserving credential management. However, existing credential systems often depend on centralized issuers, lack efficient aggregation mechanisms, or fail to ensure unlinkability across authentication sessions. To address these challenges, we propose DISC (Decentralized Identity System with Self-Sovereign Credential Aggregation), a novel credential system that enables multi-authority credential issuance, user-controlled credential aggregation, and unlinkable authentication. DISC allows users to aggregate credentials from multiple issuers while maintaining constant-size authentication tokens and supporting batch verification for scalable authentication. Additionally, DISC ensures unlinkability of aggregated authentication tokens, preventing verifiers from correlating sessions even when credentials share attributes. Security analysis proves DISC’s unforgeability, anonymity, and unlinkability, while experimental results confirm its efficiency in credential issuance, aggregation, and verification. Compared to existing schemes, DISC offers a scalable, privacy-preserving, and efficient decentralized identity solution, making it well-suited for real-world applications requiring secure and privacy-preserving identity verification.
Keywords
Decentralized identity, anonymous credentials, self-sovereign identity, self-sovereign aggregation, privacypreserving authentication, multi-authority credential issuance
Discipline
Information Security
Research Areas
Cybersecurity
Areas of Excellence
Digital transformation
Publication
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
First Page
12871
Last Page
12886
ISSN
1556-6013
Identifier
10.1109/TIFS.2025.3635058
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Citation
YANG, Yang; CHING, Wai Keung; HUANG, Minming; INNET, Supachate; YANG, Guomin; PANG, Hwee Hwa; and DENG, Robert H..
DISC: Decentralized identity system with self-sovereign credential aggregation. (2025). IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security. 12871-12886.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/11064
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2025.3635058