Enabling Identity for the IoT-as-a-Service Business Model

The IoT-as-a-Service (IoTaaS) business model has already been identified by some people from both industry and academia, but has not been formally defined. IoTaaS offers IoT devices on demand, with considerable cost savings and resource optimization. In addition, it enables different applications to reuse the existing devices. However, this business model is associated with different technological challenges that need to be addressed, one of which is the identity problem. Focusing on this, self-sovereign identity (SSI) schemes have proven to provide better privacy and scalability than traditional identity paradigms, which is especially important in the IoT owing to its characteristics. In this paper, we formally analyze an IoTaaS business model, identifying and detailing its main technological challenges. In addition, we tackle the identity problem of this business model and propose an SSI-based identity management system, which is compliant with the existing standards from the W3C, and include a performance evaluation.