Mediterraneus Protocol

Luca Giorgino and Andrea Vesco, "The Mediterraneus Protocol: building an SSI native decentralised ecosystem of digital services," white paper v1.0, arXiv, 2024. pdf

Introduction

The Mediterraneus protocol is designed to support the development of an Internet of Services, owned by their creators, and consumed by users, by presenting their decentralised digital identity and a proof of service purchase. The protocol is Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) native, it integrates the SSI model at the core of its working principles to overcome the limitations resulting from the use of pseudonyms and centralised access control of existing Web3 solutions. The protocol is designed to enable SSI-based decentralised access control, thus fully respecting and supporting the decentralised, trustless, censorship-resistant, self-organising and non-custodial principles envisaged for the Internet of Services of the future.
Future work in the medium term will focus on (i) integrating the ZK VCs, based on the BBS+ signature, to provide users with the ability to present anonymous and selective disclosure VC for privacy preservation while limiting linkability across the ecosystem, (ii) updating the working principles of the protocol to accept VCs issued by different issuers, exploiting the natural and very important interoperability feature of the SSI model; while this is straightforward for off-chain interactions, it is not straightforward for on-chain interactions, and (iii) implementing different service access options (e.g., one-time, perpetual, time-bound). In the long term, future research will focus on developing cryptographic techniques for the generation and on-chain verification identity proofs.