Decentralized Credential Status Management: A Paradigm Shift in Digital Trust

Abstract: Public key infrastructures are essential for Internet security, ensuring robust certificate management and revocation mechanisms. The transition from centralized to decentralized systems presents challenges such as trust distribution and privacy-preserving credential management. The transition from centralized to decentralized systems is motivated by addressing the single points of failure inherent in centralized systems and leveraging decentralized technologies' transparency and resilience. This paper explores the evolution of certificate status management from centralized to decentralized frameworks, focusing on blockchain technology and advanced cryptography. We provide a taxonomy of the challenges of centralized systems and discuss opportunities provided by existing decentralized technologies. Our findings reveal that, although blockchain technologies enhance security and trust distribution, they represent a bottleneck for parallel computation and face inefficiencies in cryptographic computations. For this reason, we propose a framework of decentralized technology components that addresses such shortcomings to advance the paradigm shift toward decentralized credential status management.