{"ID":2861950,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02841","arxiv_id":"2511.02841","title":"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.","short_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 dialog...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02841","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.02841v2","authors":"[\"Sandro Rodriguez Garzon\",\"Awid Vaziry\",\"Enis Mert Kuzu\",\"Dennis Enrique Gehrmann\",\"Buse Varkan\",\"Alexander Gaballa\",\"Axel Küpper\"]","published":"2025-10-01T08:10:37Z","proceeding":"cs.CR","tasks":"[\"cs.CR\",\"cs.MA\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\",\"Generative Adversarial Network\"]","has_code":false}