The Doctoral School in Sciences and Engineering is happy to invite you to Alexandra HÖß’s defence entitled
Innovating Digital Identity Infrastructures: On the Design of Decentralized Digital Identities and the
Role of Blockchain
Supervisor: Prof. Dr Gilbert FRIDGEN
The internet was created without a reliable built-in identity infrastructure, and since its emergence, organizations have worked hard to close this deficiency. However, fragmented or federated digital identity infrastructures that have tended to dominate both fail to address complex requirements, especially those concerning user privacy and convenience. In recent years, the idea of a decentralized digital identity infrastructure has offered hope of effectively addressing such and other needs. To realize this innovation, many organizations have considered blockchain as an enabling technology. Yet, with policy-makers abandoning blockchain as an infrastructural component the role of this technology has become highly contested. This cumulative thesis develops an improved understanding of decentralized digital identity infrastructures, and the role that blockchain can play in these infrastructures. It builds on eight research papers and one book chapter that investigate various aspects related to the design and management of decentralized digital identity infrastructures. Their findings are synthesized into three main parts, using Grisot et al.’s (2014) three dimensions of innovation of, in, and on digital infrastructures. The first part of this thesis conceptualizes the paradigmatic innovation of decentralized digital identity infrastructures and details their core components, namely digital attestations, digital identity wallets, and trust registries. The second part synthesizes the implementation challenges and current innovations in each of these components. In particular, it analyzes the role of blockchain technology as a potential innovation in decentralized digital identity infrastructures. The third and final part explores how organizations can create value through innovations on decentralized digital identity infrastructures. Moreover, it provides methodological guidance on how to achieve legal compliance by design when developing such innovations