Decentralized Identifiers and Self-Sovereign Identity in 6G

A key challenge for mobile network operators in 6G is to bring together and orchestrate a variety of new emerging players of today's mobile eco-systems in order to provide economically viable and seamless mobile connectivity in the form of a multi-stakeholder service. With each new player, be it a cloud, edge, or hardware provider, the need for interfaces with secure authentication and authorization mechanisms increases, as does the complexity and operational costs of the public key infrastructures required for the identity and key management. While today's centralized public key infrastructures have proven to be technically feasible in confined and trusted spaces, they do not provide the required security for access control once centralized identity providers must be avoided because of limited cross-domain interoperability, national data protection legislation, or geopolitical-strategic reasons. Recent decentralized identity management concepts, such as the W3C recommendation of decentralized identifiers, provide a secure, tamper-proof, and cross-domain identity management alternative for future multi-stakeholder 6G networks without relying on centralized identity providers or certification authorities. This article introduces the concept of decentralized identifiers together with the principles of self-sovereign identity, and discusses opportunities and potential benefits of their application and usage for cross-domain and privacy-preserving identity and key management in 6G networks.