DP-DID: A Dynamic and Proactive Decentralized Identity System

Abstract

Decentralized identity (DID) is a transformative paradigm that leverages blockchain, decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials (VCs) to enable self-sovereign and decentralized identity management with myriad application areas. However, existing DID implementations are confronted with two key challenges: insufficient decentralization and vulnerability to mobile adversary attacks. First, they paradoxically introduce central identity resolvers, intermediaries or static committees to manage critical identity services, key management or credential issuance, which violates the decentralized controlling aim against a single point of failure. Second, these systems are vulnerable to mobile adversaries who can gradually compromise multiple nodes or committee members over a long period, eventually seizing control of the system. In this paper, we propose DP-DID, the first dynamic and proactive decentralized identity system specifically designed to resist mobile adversary attacks in dynamic committee settings. To eliminate centralized authorities, DP-DID leverages blockchain, dynamic committees and BLS (Named after Boneh, Lynn, and Shacham) signatures, which achieves decentralization. In addition, we design a dynamic and batch proactive secret sharing (DBPSS) scheme for DP-DID to ensure proactive security against mobile adversary attacks. This is achieved by allowing at most t (threshold) committees to be corrupted per period, with the set of corrupted committees changing dynamically even if all players are eventually compromised. By incorporating DBPSS, DP-DID achieves efficient key management for multiple users in dynamic settings, enhancing overall system scalability. Through rigorous analysis, DP-DID is proven to be forward secure and secure against mobile adversary attacks under a widely adopted malicious model. Extensive experiments show that DP-DID has efficient performance, and our DBPSS scheme outperforms FaB-DPSS by over $11.67\times $ in key handover efficiency.