Self-Sovereign Identity Architecture for National Use with Wallet Proofs Zero-Knowledge and the VWR Framework

National identity must deliver fast, fair decisions without exposing personal data. This article advances a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) architecture, reinforced by a Verify-Without-Reveal (VWR) framework, to achieve that goal at national scale.

— MD Abul Mansur

Introduction

National identity systems must deliver fast, fair decisions for millions of people every day. They also carry the risk of exposing personal data across agencies and sectors. Many current platforms still default to broad lookups of full records when a simple truth value would do. This behaviour erodes trust and increases legal risk under data-protection rules. It also creates technical debt, because copied records spread and are hard to control later. This article proposes a different path. It places Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) at the centre and reinforces it with a Verify-Without-Reveal (VWR) policy and audit spine. SSI moves credentials to a citizen wallet and enables selective disclosure and zero-knowledge proofs. VWR ensures that, even when the holder is not present, verifiers receive only a yes/no answer bound to a declared purpose, and every access is logged in an immutable audit trail. Together they turn privacy by design into routine system behaviour.

Motivation and scope of the Research

This work is motivated by three pressures. First is scale. National workloads demand low latency and high throughput. Predicate proofs and yes/no answers are small and fast, which makes them fit. Second is trust. People accept digital services when they keep control and can see the audit trail. SSI wallets and citizen portals satisfy that need. Third is interoperability. Services must work across borders and sectors. Standards for DIDs, verifiable credentials, revocation, and OpenID for Verifiable Credentials make this possible.

Problem Analysis

National identity systems face a cluster of problems that reinforce one another. Unnecessary disclosure occurs when front-line systems pull whole records for simple checks. Cross-agency “surfing” occurs when insiders browse identity data beyond a lawful purpose. Linkability grows when a single identifier appears in many domains or when metadata ties events together. Biometric risk rises when liveness is weak or when models embed bias. These issues are technical and institutional at once. An SSI-VWR design, reinforced by a verify-without-reveal policy spine, must therefore change both the cryptography and the control plane so that minimal disclosure, purpose enforcement, and immutable accountability become routine.

Conclusion and Future Work

This article has argued that national identity can be both fast and private when Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) is reinforced by a Verify-Without-Reveal (VWR) enforcement spine. The core shift is from dossiers to decisions. Holder-present interactions rely on wallet-based selective disclosure and zero-knowledge proofs, so verifiers learn only what is necessary to act. Holder-absent interactions replace broad queries with purpose-bound yes/no checks that return truth values or short-lived tokens and nothing more. Every access, in both modes, is evaluated by zero-trust policy encoded in a public purpose catalogue and recorded as an immutable event whose integrity is anchored by a permissioned ledger, giving regulators and citizens verifiable visibility without placing personal data on chain.