A Middleware Architecture for Self-Sovereign Identity Authentication and Authorization

In the evolving digital identity landscape, the concept of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) has emerged as a paradigm shift, empowering individuals with the ownership and control of their personal information. This paper introduces a middleware architecture that leverages the principles of SSI, enabling application clients to authenticate and authorize users holding Verifiable Credentials via the OpenID Connect protocol. This architecture simplifies adoption for new and existing service providers by letting them build on established standards with proven tools. To further simplify configuration, we introduce a tailored login policy language based on JSON. We validate our architecture by implementing it and testing it with different services.