AI Agents with Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02841v1
• Date: Wed, 01 Oct 2025 08:10:37 GMT
• Title: AI Agents with Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials
• Authors: Sandro Rodriguez Garzon, Awid Vaziry, Enis Mert Kuzu, Dennis Enrique Gehrmann, Buse Varkan, Alexander Gaballa, Axel Küpper,
• Abstract summary: This article presents a prototypical multi-agent system, where each agent is endowed with a self-sovereign digital identity.<n>It combines a unique and ledger-anchored Decentralized Identifier (DID) of an agent with a set of third-party issued Verifiable Credentials (VCs)<n>It enables agents at the start of a dialog to prove ownership of their self-controlled DIDs for authentication purposes and to establish various cross-domain trust relationships.
• Score: 32.505127447635864
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: LLM-based AI agents still lack the technical means to automatically build nuanced and differentiated trust in other agents at the beginning of an agent-to-agent dialogue. But autonomous and interoperable trust establishing becomes a fundamental prerequisite once agents start to operate beyond isolated environments and engage in dialogues across individual or organizational boundaries. A promising way to fill this gap in Agentic AI is to equip agents with long-lived digital identities and introduce tamper-proof and flexible identity-bound attestations of agents, provisioned by commonly trusted third parties and designed for cross-domain verifiability. This article presents a conceptual framework and a prototypical multi-agent system, where each agent is endowed with a self-sovereign digital identity. It combines a unique and ledger-anchored Decentralized Identifier (DID) of an agent with a set of third-party issued Verifiable Credentials (VCs). This enables agents at the start of a dialog to prove ownership of their self-controlled DIDs for authentication purposes and to establish various cross-domain trust relationships through the spontaneous exchange of their self-hosted DID-bound VCs. A comprehensive evaluation of the prototypical implementation demonstrates technical feasibility but also reveals limitations once an agent's LLM is in sole charge to control the respective security procedures.

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