Bypassing Current Limitations for Implementing a Credential Delegation for the Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 is set to modernize industrial processes as we know them today. This modernization goes hand in hand with the digitalization of industry and the need to digitally identify the different devices involved in the manufacturing process. Verifiable credentials and Decentralized Identifiers, which are part of the self-sovereign identity (SSI) concept, allow decentralized identification and characterization of the devices (commonly IIoT devices) that make up Industry 4.0. However, some use cases in the Industry 4.0 cannot be modelled with standard SSI schemes. Despite the fact that delegated credentials have been defined in the W3C standard for verifiable credentials, current technologies present some important limitations that make them non-implementable. This paper analyses these limitations in the context of the problem of building delegated credentials for the Industry 4.0, and proposes an alternative based on an Hyperledger Aries RFC, bypassing these limitations. Finally, some implementation tests have been conducted in order to demonstrate that the Aries RFC does not add extra complexity in terms of performance to the normal SSI flow.