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arXiv · 2511.02841

AI Agents with Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials

Abstract

A fundamental limitation of current LLM-based AI agents is their inability to build differentiated trust among each other at the onset of an agent-to-agent dialogue. However, autonomous and interoperable trust establishment becomes essential 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 W3C Decentralized Identifier (DID) of an agent with a set of third-party issued W3C 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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Sandro Rodriguez Garzon, Awid Vaziry, Enis Mert Kuzu, Dennis Enrique Gehrmann, Buse Varkan, Alexander Gaballa, Axel Küpper. 2025-10-01. AI Agents with Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials. https://doi.org/10.5220/0014234400004052

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