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Copyright © 2025 Michael Herman (Bindloss, Alberta, Canada) – Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License

The original 10 principles from Christopher Allen’s 2016 “The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity” remain a powerful foundation. (Life with Alacrity)

But over the past decade — as digital identity systems have begun to be built, debated, and challenged — new insights from academic research, real-world deployments, regulation and evolving tech (e.g. decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials, blockchains, privacy-preserving proofs) suggest that an updated, expanded set of principles — a new update for self-sovereign identity (SSI) — could better reflect both opportunities and risks. Below is a proposed revised and expanded collection of SSI principles, integrating the original 10 while adding new ones to address trust, accountability, usability, governance, and compliance.

✅ What remains — Core Timeless Principles (original 10, refined)

I believe the original 10 remain largely valid; we restate them with slight refinement for modern context:

1. Existence (Human Primacy)
   The identity must be anchored in a real human being: digital identity cannot supplant the ineffable “I.” Systems should affirm human dignity and individuality. (Life with Alacrity)
2. Control (User Authority & Autonomy)
   Individuals must remain the ultimate authorities over their identity data. They should be able to create, modify, hide, or revoke identity data under secure, well-understood mechanisms. (Life with Alacrity)
3. Access (Transparency of Own Data)
   Users must have the ability to view (and where appropriate manage) all personal data and claims associated with their identity — no hidden data silos or gatekeepers. (Life with Alacrity)
4. Transparency (Open Systems & Algorithms)
   Identity systems, their governance, and the algorithms they rely on must be open, auditable, and as independent as possible from centralized authority. (Life with Alacrity)
5. Persistence (Longevity & Continuity)
   Identities should persist over time — ideally as long as the user desires — even if credential issuers or platforms change, while still respecting a user’s right to delete or abandon an identity. (Life with Alacrity)
6. Portability (Mobility & Transferability)
   Identity data and claims must be transportable across platforms, jurisdictions, devices — not locked into any one vendor, provider, or ecosystem. (Life with Alacrity)
7. Interoperability (Cross-system & Cross-jurisdiction Usability)
   Identities should work broadly across different systems, platforms, borders — enabling global, cross-context recognition while preserving user control. (Life with Alacrity)
8. Consent (Informed & Explicit Consent for Sharing)
   Any sharing or use of identity data must occur only with the individual’s informed and explicit consent. Consent mechanisms should be clear, user-friendly, and revocable. (Life with Alacrity)
9. Minimalization (Data Minimization & Selective Disclosure)
   Only the minimum required data should be disclosed for a given purpose (e.g. proving “over 18” without revealing date of birth). Use of selective-disclosure, zero-knowledge proofs, or cryptographic safeguards is encouraged. (Life with Alacrity)
10. Protection (Privacy, Security & Rights Safeguards)
    Users’ rights must be protected; identity systems must defend against abuse, resist censorship and coercion, secure data, and guard against identity theft or misuse. (Life with Alacrity)

➕ New Principles for SSI 7.0

Based on developments over the past decade — from academic critiques, real-world SSI schemes, regulatory pressures, and evolving threat models — I propose adding the following principles to make SSI more robust, practical, and trustworthy in modern contexts.

11. Accountability & Auditability
    While decentralization and user control are central, identity systems must also provide mechanisms for accountability — for misuse, fraud, or disputes. This may include revocation registries, audit logs, and cryptographic or institutional mechanisms that allow for tracking misuse without compromising user privacy. This balances user sovereignty with real-world responsibilities. For example, a recent SSI scheme augments privacy with joint accountability using threshold-based methods to prevent attacks while preserving user control. (arXiv)
12. Security & Resilience by Design
    SSI should rely on strong cryptographic foundations, resistance to key-compromise, replay or correlation attacks, and design for long-term resilience (including key recovery, revocation, migration, and backup). Academic surveys highlight that trust in SSI is still “complex and fragmented,” and robust security architecture is essential. (arXiv)
13. Privacy by Default & Contextual Confidentiality
    Beyond minimal disclosure, SSI systems should default to maximum privacy: user wallets, metadata protection, unlinkability across contexts, selective disclosure by default, and privacy-preserving authentication (e.g. zero-knowledge proofs, anonymous credentials). This becomes more critical especially with cross-platform and cross-jurisdiction use (e.g. in the context of the metaverse, or global Web3). (arXiv)
14. Usability & Accessibility
    SSI must be practical for real people — across digital-literacy levels, devices, geographies — and not just for technologists. Identity wallets and management tools should be easy to use, resilient to device loss, data corruption, or jurisdictional changes. Also, cost and usability barriers must be minimized so that SSI remains inclusive (“available to all”). This is especially important for global adoption (e.g. for refugees, under-served populations). (Sovereign Cities)
15. Governance & Community Stewardship
    Given SSI’s public-good dimensions (interoperability, privacy, security), there needs to be governance mechanisms — community, standard-bodies or decentralized governance — to steward protocols, resolve disputes, evolve standards, and ensure accountability. This ensures that identity systems remain aligned with human rights, collective interest, and social norms. Some proponents argue turning original principles into legally or socially codified “duties” rather than just “best practices.” (Life with Alacrity)
16. Compliance & Ethical Legality
    SSI systems should respect applicable laws, human rights, data-protection regulations (e.g. privacy laws, nondiscrimination), and ethical norms — especially when deployed globally across jurisdictions. This principle helps bridge SSI with regulatory realities (e.g. GDPR) while preserving user sovereignty. Indeed, recent literature critiques SSI schemes on GDPR compliance. (arXiv)
17. Recoverability & Continuity (Key/Access Loss Handling)
    Real people lose devices, forget credentials, or face emergencies. SSI must support mechanisms for recovery, transfer, or delegation — e.g. social recovery, multi-party escrow, recovery tokens — so that a user’s identity does not become irretrievably lost. This ensures persistence doesn’t become fragility.
18. Minimal Trust Assumptions (Decentralization of Trust)
    SSI should minimize reliance on central trusted parties; trust should be distributed, protocol-based, cryptographically verifiable, and avoid single points of failure (or control). This strengthens autonomy and reduces governance risk.
19. Transparency of Governance & Policy (Beyond Implementation)
    Not just open code, but also open governance: decisions, upgrades, policies for revocation, dispute resolution, credential issuance — should be transparent, documented, and participatory (ideally community-driven).
20. Inter-Community and Social Interoperability (Normalization of Claims & Contexts)
    Beyond technical interoperability, identity systems should support semantic and social interoperability: standard vocabularies, claim schemas, norms for credential issuance and verification, recognition across communities/jurisdictions. This avoids fragmentation even in decentralized ecosystems.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Why these additions — What changed since 2016

• The rise of decentralized identity implementations (DIDs, verifiable credentials, wallets, blockchain-based registries) has shown the importance of security, recoverability, privacy by default, and regulatory compliance.
• Academic scrutiny (e.g. risk of misuse, identity theft, trust fragmentation, accountability) reveals that pure decentralization without accountability can be risky. (arXiv)
• Real-world scenarios — global mobility, cross-jurisdiction identity, refugees, displaced people — demand usability, accessibility, portability, and social interoperability to make SSI inclusive and effective.
• Legal/regulatory frameworks (e.g. privacy laws, data protection, anti-money laundering) increasingly intersect with identity systems — forcing SSI to consider compliance, ethicality, and governance. (arXiv)
• As identity becomes central to emerging domains (e.g. Web3, metaverse, decentralized finance), there is a need for governance, community stewardship, transparent policy, and inter-community standards to avoid fragmentation and fragmentation-driven insecurity. (arXiv)

⚠️ Challenges & Trade-offs — Why SSI 7.0 must be “balanced and diversified”

Adding more principles inevitably creates tension — greater security and governance can come at the cost of simplicity or decentralization; accountability mechanisms risk undermining privacy; recoverability may introduce attack surfaces; compliance may conflict with anonymity. A robust SSI 7.0 must therefore balance these trade-offs, offering diversified principles so that implementers can make conscious, value-driven design choices depending on the context (e.g. voting, healthcare, travel, social networking).

📝 SSI 7.0 Principles Proposal — Draft for Community Use

Here’s a draft list, which could serve as a starting point for community discussion, design, and standardization:

1. Existence (Human Primacy)
2. Control (User Authority & Autonomy)
3. Access (Data Transparency to Users)
4. Transparency (Open Systems & Algorithms)
5. Persistence (Longevity & Continuity)
6. Portability (Mobility & Transferability)
7. Interoperability (Technical & Semantic)
8. Consent (Informed, Explicit, Revocable)
9. Minimalization (Data Minimization & Selective Disclosure)
10. Protection (Privacy, Security & Rights Safeguards)
11. Accountability & Auditability
12. Security & Resilience by Design
13. Privacy by Default & Contextual Confidentiality
14. Usability & Accessibility
15. Governance & Community Stewardship
16. Compliance & Ethical Legality
17. Recoverability & Continuity (Key/Access Loss Handling)
18. Minimal Trust Assumptions (Decentralized Trust)
19. Transparent Governance & Policy
20. Inter-Community / Social Interoperability (Semantic & Contextual)

🎯 How This Might Be Used — Next Steps

• Use this as a living framework: publish a draft “SSI 7.0 Principles” document (e.g. on GitHub) and invite contributions from technologists, regulators, civil-society, and end users — just as the 2025 revision project under the original author invites. (Life with Alacrity)
• When designing or evaluating SSI systems (wallets, DIDs, credentials, revocation), use this expanded set to assess trade-offs — e.g. does this system meet privacy by default? Does it include recovery mechanisms? Is governance transparent?
• For implementations in sensitive contexts (healthcare, refugees, KYC, cross-border identity) embed governance, compliance, accountability, and usability early — not as afterthoughts.

Reference: https://chatgpt.com/share/692bdce6-1b24-8008-812d-d9e55bae0f2c