This article introduces foundational components for decentralized B2B data sharing based on the solid protocol, emphasizing data sovereignty, security, and interoperability. These components are: (1) Authorization app (AuthApp) – facilitating granular control and compliance in access granting and revocation processes; (2) rights delegation proxy (RDP) – supporting controlled delegation of rights, enabling natural persons to act on behalf of organizations while ensuring privacy and traceability; (3) data provisioning proxy (DPP) – allowing seamless and secure data provisioning across organizations while masking the identity of upstream data sources to protect business interests. The components enable the creation of end-to-end, standards-based, flexible data value chains. We validate their applicability through a real-world financial services use case involving loan processing, which illustrates data sharing and protection challenges in B2B ecosystems.

We evaluate a bundle of specifications from the Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) paradigm to construct an authentication protocol for the Web. We demonstrate how relevant standards such as W3C Verifiable Credentials (VC), W3C Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs), and components of the Hyperledger Aries Framework are to be assembled methodologically into a protocol. We make those assumptions from standard trust models explicit that underlie the derived protocol, and verify security and privacy properties, notably secrecy, authentication, and unlinkability. This enables us to formally justify the additional precision that we urge these specifications to consider, to ensure that implementors of SSI-based systems do not neglect security-critical controls.

We present an architecture for authentication and authorization on the Web that is based on the Self-Sovereign Identity paradigm. Using our architecture, we aim to achieve semantic interoperability across different approaches to SSI. We build on the underlying RDF data model of the W3C’s recommendation for Verifiable Credentials and specify semantic access control rules using SHACL. Our communication protocol for an authorization process is based on Decentralised Identifiers and extends the Hyperledger Aries Present Proof protocol. We propose a modular architecture that allows for flexible extension, e. g., for supporting more signature schemes or Decentralised Identifier Methods. For evaluation, we implemented a Proof-of-Concept: We show that a Web-based approach to SSI outperfoms a blockchain-based approach to SSI in terms of End-to-End execution time.