Decentralized Identifiers and Self-sovereign Identity in 6G

One of the key challenges for mobile network operators in the future will be to bring together a wide range of new players in the mobile network market under a common umbrella and to orchestrate their innovative technologies to provide economically viable and seamless mobile connectivity to the mobile subscribers. 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 associated identity and key management. While today's centralized public key infrastructures have proven themselves to be technically feasible in confined and trusted spaces, they do not provide the required security once centralized identity providers must be avoided, e.g., because of limited cross-domain interoperability or national data protection legislation, and state-dependent certification authorities can't be commonly trusted, e.g., because of geopolitical reasons. Recent decentralized identity management concepts, such as the W3C proposed recommendation of Decentralized Identifiers, provide a secure, tamper-proof, and cross-domain identity management alternative for future multitenancy 6G networks without relying on identity provider 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-actor and privacy-preserving identity and key management in the next mobile network generation 6G.