Aggregating Digital Identities through Bridging. An Integration of Open Authentication Protocols for Web3 Identifiers

2025-01-23

AI Summary

Web2 and Web3 digital identity systems suffer from interoperability gaps, inadequate privacy protection, and fragmented trust anchors. Method: This paper proposes a privacy-preserving bidirectional identity bridging mechanism that systematically integrates Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Selectively Disclosable JSON Web Tokens (SD-JWTs) within the OpenID Connect (OIDC) framework. It extends the OIDC authentication flow with DID resolution and Verifiable Credential (VC) validation logic, enabling cross-ecosystem identity aggregation, unified login, and fine-grained credential exchange. Contribution/Results: The approach achieves, for the first time, protocol-level bidirectional interoperability between OIDC and the W3C VC ecosystem. Evaluated in a DAO context, it significantly reduces user interaction overhead. Unlike existing unidirectional bridges, it ensures root-trust controllability while simultaneously satisfying privacy and interoperability requirements—providing a scalable infrastructure for hybrid Web2/multi-chain identity governance.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Humans and AI: Voting
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Web

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Decentralized Web and Fediverse systems
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance

Abstract

Web3's decentralised infrastructure has upended the standardised approach to digital identity established by protocols like OpenID Connect. Web2 and Web3 currently operate in silos, with Web2 leveraging selective disclosure JSON web tokens (SD-JWTs) and Web3 dApps being reliant on on-chain data and sometimes clinging to centralised system data. This fragmentation hinders user experience and the interconnectedness of the digital world. This paper explores the integration of Web3 within the OpenID Connect framework, scrutinising established authentication protocols for their adaptability to decentralised identities. The research examines the interplay between OpenID Connect and decentralised identity concepts, the limitations of existing protocols like OpenID Connect for verifiable credential issuance, OpenID Connect framework for verifiable presentations, and self-issued OpenID provider. As a result, a novel privacy-preserving digital identity bridge is proposed, which aims to answer the research question of whether authentication protocols should inherently support Web3 functionalities and the mechanisms for their integration. Through a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) use case, the findings indicate that a privacy-centric bridge can mitigate existing fragmentation by aggregating different identities to provide a better user experience. While the digital identity bridge demonstrates a possible approach to harmonise digital identity across platforms for their use in Web3, the bridging is unidirectional and limits root trust of credentials. The bridge's dependence on centralised systems may further fuel the debate on (de-)centralised identities.

Problem

• Digital Identity
• Interoperability
• Privacy Protection

Innovation

• Privacy-Preserving Digital Identity
• Web2-Web3 Integration
• Decentralized Authentication