Self Sovereign Identity (SSI) is silently taking off.
Credentials are often hosted on the providers we use—think about Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. They all save our passwords, and we need to fill them out to verify that we have the right to access our accounts.
SSI flips this, so the user is in charge of the identity; on top of that, identities are no longer like they used to be.
You are used to having an email, for example, dviejo@kfs.es. This tells you information about the person; you can scrape it on the Internet and get to the real person.
What's a DID?
With SSI, you have a Decentralized Identifier (DID) that says nothing about the user; in fact, the simplest DID is a public key encoded string like:
did:key:<public_key>
Then, you can prove your identity by signing data with your private key, using Public Key Infrastructure.
Using DIDs stored in your wallet, you can get Verifiable Credentials(VC), which are certifications that an issuer can send to you.
A common use case for Verifiable credentials is a University Degree. Normally, the University gives you a diploma on paper or PDF, which you need to present.
There have been numerous cases of fraud using the previous, though, with VC, this is not possible unless the Issuer(the university) has signed the credential with their private keys, which is much harder than just generating a PDF.
What wallet should I use?
What wallet applications are out there?
There are two:
Sphereon Wallet is based on Veramo, while Paradym Wallet is based on Credo-ts (prev Hyperledger Aries)
You can also run Hyperledger Aries on the browser, check the following meetup on YouTube, or access the repository on Github.
Are you looking to master Hyperledger Fabric?
Check out the new Fabric course by the creator or Bevel Operator Fabric: https://www.kfs.es/course