Self Sovereign Identity Based E-petition Scheme

Abstract

Electronic petitions are one of the important tools used for democratic participation. Citizens can express their support or dissatisfaction with government investments or regulations. Citizens can also provide sufficient feedback to organizations or government institutions through electronic petitions. In this paper, we have designed an electronic petition scheme using blockchain as a source of trust for protecting e-petition’s users’ privacy and security. With our e-petition system, citizens can anonymously participate an e-petition and expresses their support or dissatisfaction with a social and political issue freely. We have used Sovrin blockchain as source of trust by using registry for Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) and their associated public keys and communication endpoints. We have also used other Sovrin components such as verifiable credentials, proofs and agents for implementing our privacy and security preserving e-petition scheme. Lastly, we have analyzed security, privacy and performance of our e-petition system.