Interid Enables Modular Verification across Diverse Self-Sovereign Identity Ecosystems

The growing field of Self-Sovereign Identity promises to give individuals greater control over their digital credentials, but a fragmented landscape of different SSI ecosystems currently hinders widespread adoption. Hakan Yildiz and Axel Küpper, both from Technische Universität Berlin, along with their colleagues, address this challenge by presenting interID, a new application that acts as a universal verifier across these disparate systems. The team developed a modular system capable of connecting to multiple SSI verification services, effectively translating between them and enabling seamless credential verification regardless of the underlying technology. This achievement represents a significant step towards true interoperability in digital identity, demonstrated by successful verification across major ecosystems including Hyperledger Indy/Aries, EBSI, and EUDI, with minimal performance impact and the potential for future expansion.

The core of interID is a unified Application Programming Interface (API) that abstracts the complexities of underlying protocols for service providers, simplifying integration and reducing implementation costs.

Experiments revealed that interID successfully verifies credentials across all tested wallets, demonstrating its ability to function within disparate SSI environments without compromising performance. The system’s modular architecture allows for the efficient incorporation of additional SSI frameworks, extending its adaptability and future-proofing its functionality. Measurements confirm minimal performance overhead during credential verification, indicating that the orchestration layer does not significantly impede the process.

This achievement is crucial for real-world applications where speed and efficiency are paramount. The research delivers a practical solution and architectural pattern for achieving interoperability in SSI verifier implementations, paving the way for a more connected and user-centric digital identity landscape. This breakthrough enables individuals to exert greater control over their credentials, regardless of the issuing ecosystem, and facilitates seamless access to services across different platforms.

The authors acknowledge that the evaluation focused on a specific set of ecosystems and wallets, and future work could expand testing to a wider range of implementations. Further research directions include exploring automated adaptation to new SSI ecosystems and investigating the scalability of the orchestration layer to support a larger volume of verification requests.