A Systematic Literature Review of Blockchain Technology for Identity Management

Abstract

Thanks to identity management solutions, identities and operations such as access control have become increasingly common in real-world applications. The rapid growth of blockchain technology has a significant impact on various sectors like financial and healthcare institutions. Blockchain technology has attracted significant attention due to its distinctive characteristics, such as decentralization, trustworthiness, and immutability, therefore, it has recently been employed in identity management where the decentralized and distributed nature of blockchain technology eliminates the need for a trusted third party. Recently, endeavors have been made to implement blockchain-based identity management solutions that enable users to take ownership of their identities. Therefore, it is imperative to conduct an extensive review of the implementation of blockchain in identity management. This systematic review analyzes the state-of-the-art blockchain researches in the realm of identity management and provides a systematic analysis of the identified literature. After extracting relevant scientific papers, we divide the results into various categories. Finally, we highlight several research challenges and potential future research directions on blockchain in the context of identity management.