Latency Analysis of Blockchain-Based SSI Applications

Abstract

Several revolutionary applications have been built on the distributed ledgers of blockchain (BC) technology. Besides cryptocurrencies, many other application fields can be found in smart systems exploiting smart contracts and Self Sovereign Identity (SSI) management. The Hyperledger Indy platform is a suitable open-source solution for realizing permissioned BC systems for SSI projects. SSI applications usually require short response times from the underlying BC network, which may vary highly depending on the application type, the used BC software, and the actual BC deployment parameters. To support the developers and users of SSI applications, we present a detailed latency analysis of a permissioned BC system built with Indy and Aries. To streamline our experiments, we developed a Python application using containerized Indy and Aries components from official Hyperledger repositories. We deployed our experimental application on multiple virtual machines in the public Google Cloud Platform and on our local, private cloud using a Docker platform with Kubernetes. We evaluated and compared their performance benchmarked by Read and Write latencies. We found that the local Indy ledger reads and writes 30–50%, and 65–85% faster than the Indy ledger running on the Google Cloud Platform, respectively.