A Unified Framework for Decentralized Identity and Trust Management in IoT Using Self-Sovereign Identity and IOTA

Abstract

The growing scale and complexity of IoT (Internet of Things) networks demand robust security models that provide both secure identity authentication and reliable trust evaluation. While Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) enables decentralized and user-centric authentication, ensuring the continuous trustworthiness of participating nodes remains a challenge. This paper presents a unified framework that combines SSI-based decentralized authentication with IOTA-ledger-assisted trust evaluation to provide an integrated security architecture for IoT systems. The proposed architecture guarantees that only authenticated nodes can participate in the network while continuously assessing their behavior and trustworthiness through immutable and tamper-resistant trust scores. Our approach is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to unify SSI-based authentication with IOTA-assisted trust evaluation, offering a holistic IoT security framework.