A Systematic Literature Mapping on Using Blockchain Technology in Identity Management

Abstract

Although blockchain is an emerging technology, it has been applied in a lot of domains by leveraging its features. Traditional identity management systems have many issues regarding security and privacy of personal data. Blockchain has the potential to mitigate and avoid such issues by creating trust among the parties involved in the system while reducing reliance on third-party authorities. The first blockchain-based identity management solutions were launched in 2016. Since then, due to high demand, numerous primary and experimental studies and intatives have been carried out to provide solutions to this research topic. Along with that, there are also a lot of secondary studies to overview the current state of research on this topic. However, the number of systematic research articles is still limited and each research has it limitation. Through this study, we provide a novel systematic literature including categorization of studies into predefined categories (domain, research type, place of publication), analysis of publication frequency, co-authorship, number of papers citing each paper of all studied papers. Comparing to other systematic literature mapping studies, our paper provides a more comprehensive view of the studied articles. In particular, we analyze the number of citations, which no study has ever done. In this research, we studied 361 papers published from January 2009 to April 2022 in four big databases (IEEE Explore, ACM Digital Library, ScienceDirect, Springer Link), the largest number of articles studied compared to previous researches. The obtained results show that most of the articles under validation research type (providing solution and implementing that solution but not in real-world scenarios) propose solutions/systems, models/schemes and architectures to address general problems. We also find that the majority of authors works alone or collaborate in a separate group and co-work in only one paper. This shows that there is no long term collaboration in blockchain-based IdM identity management, and thus subsequent publications presenting real-world blockchain-based identity management products do not exist.