Self-Sovereign Identity

2 The basic building blocks of SSI

Drummond Reed, Rieks Joosten, and Oskar van Deventer

To help describe the core components of SSI architecture, we enlisted two of the leaders in SSI in Europe: Rieks Joosten and Oskar van Deventer of TNO, the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research. Rieks is a senior scientist focused on business information processes and information security. Oskar is a senior scientist for blockchain networking. Together, they are two of the founders of the European SSI Framework Laboratory (ESSIF-Lab).

As we explained in chapter 1, SSI is relatively new, having only emerged onto the internet stage in 2016. At one level, SSI is a set of principles about how identity and personal data control should work ...