Owning your data through Self-Sovereign Identity: agents implementation for Verifiable Credentials interaction

Nowadays, most of our data is owned by private companies, and everyone knows everything about us because privacy online is not well preserved. Imagining a world different from this is difficult, but things can change thanks to Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). SSI approach aims to bring credentials back to the actual owners, the people. This is possible through cryptography and secure authentication layers (e.g., OAuth, OpenIDConnect). The developed product embraces this philosophy and offers a solution where the users are the holders, issuers, or verifiers of Verifiable Credentials (VCs). Specifically, will be developed software agents who create, issue, verify, modify or even revoke the credentials, leveraging an SSI Kit. In this thesis, we propose a methodology to merge SSI off-chain (i.e., outside the blockchain) operations with on-chain smart contracts. In particular, the job has been divided into three macro stages: firstly, has been done a deep dive into the SSI technology, studying all of its primitives and analyzing the problem; secondly, has been developed a Software Development Kit (SDK), which enabled us to dialog with an SSI Kit (off-chain logic); in the meantime, my friend and co-worker Matteo Midena developed the smart contracts (on-chain logic); finally, off-chain and on-chain solutions has been merged into a proof of concept web application. One of the final features is that the verifier (who inspects the validity of the credentials) can reflect on-chain the off-chain verification results, saving time for the following examinations. Improvements and additional features are needed to complete the software, but this constitutes a good baseline for future works.