Open Questions

The most consequential open question about the identity layer concerns key management. Self-sovereign identity depends on participants controlling their own cryptographic keys. But participants lose devices, forget passwords, and in some cases face coercive actors who attempt to extract keys through legal or extralegal pressure. The mechanisms for key recovery that do not reintroduce the dependence on trusted intermediaries that self-sovereign identity was designed to eliminate are technically unsatisfying in their current forms. This is a genuine unsolved problem, and the identity architecture must be honest about it. The design needs explicit tradeoffs, threat models, and a current security review.