arXiv subjects

Sandro Rodriguez Garzon

Publications and source records attributed to Sandro Rodriguez Garzon.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Know Your Contract: eIDAS-Based Verifiable Legal Identities for Smart Contracts, Enabling Regulatory-Compliant On-Chain Operations

Public blockchains provide no native mechanism to verify the legal identity behind a deployed smart contract, which blocks institutional adoption and compliance with EU regulations such as MiCA and AMLR. We present KYC Seal, the first protocol that extends the EU eIDAS trust infrastructure to Ethereum smart contracts by cryptographically binding them to Qualified Electronic Seals issued by Qualified Trust Service Providers (QTSPs). The protocol realizes the full eIDAS trust chain, from the European Commission's List of Trusted Lists through Member-State trusted lists and QTSP-signed X.509 certificates down to the individual smart contract, natively on-chain. An on-chain parser extracts identity fields directly from the QTSP-signed certificate bytes at registration. Both cryptographic verifications, the QTSP issuance signature and the certificate holder's seal signature, are performed once at registration and cached as on-chain state, reducing per-interaction seal verification to a pure state check. A new P-256 elliptic-curve precompile in Ethereum (deployed December 2025) makes these one-time cryptographic steps economical, enabling trustless on-chain verification of eIDAS identities without oracles or runtime intermediaries. A reference implementation, a formal security analysis, and a gas evaluation are the subject of forthcoming work.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

AI Agents with Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials

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.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Secure and Trustful Cross-domain Communication with Decentralized Identifiers in 5G and Beyond

In the evolving landscape of future mobile networks, there is a critical need for secure and trustful communication modalities to support dynamic interactions among core network components of different network domains. This paper proposes the application of W3C-endorsed Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) to establish secure and trustful communication channels among network functions in 5G and subsequent generations. A new communication agent is introduced that integrates seamlessly with 5G-standardized network functions and utilizes a DID-based application layer transport protocol to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity for cross-domain interactions. A comparative analysis of the two different versions of the DID-based communication protocol for inter network function communication reveals compatibility advantages of the latest protocol iteration. Furthermore, a comprehensive evaluation of the communication overhead caused by both protocol iterations compared to traditional TCP/TLS shows the benefits of using DIDs to improve communication security, albeit with performance loses compared to TCP/TLS. These results uncover the potential of DID-based communication for future mobile networks but also point out areas for optimization.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Towards Multi-Agent Economies: Enhancing the A2A Protocol with Ledger-Anchored Identities and x402 Micropayments for AI Agents

This research article presents a novel architecture to empower multi-agent economies by addressing two critical limitations of the emerging Agent2Agent (A2A) communication protocol: decentralized agent discoverability and agent-to-agent micropayments. By integrating distributed ledger technology (DLT), this architecture enables tamper-proof, on-chain publishing of AgentCards as smart contracts, providing secure and verifiable agent identities. The architecture further extends A2A with the x402 open standard, facilitating blockchain-agnostic, HTTP-based micropayments via the HTTP 402 status code. This enables autonomous agents to seamlessly discover, authenticate, and compensate each other across organizational boundaries. This work further presents a comprehensive technical implementation and evaluation, demonstrating the feasibility of DLT-based agent discovery and micropayments. The proposed approach lays the groundwork for secure, scalable, and economically viable multi-agent ecosystems, advancing the field of agentic AI toward trusted, autonomous economic interactions.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2025

SoK: A Taxonomy for Distributed-Ledger-Based Identity Management

The intersection of blockchain (distributed ledger) and identity management lacks a comprehensive framework for classifying distributed-ledger-based identity solutions. This paper introduces a methodologically developed taxonomy derived from the analysis of 390 scientific papers and expert discussions. The resulting framework consists of 22 dimensions with 113 characteristics, organized into three groups: trust anchor implementations, identity architectures (identifiers and credentials), and ledger specifications. This taxonomy facilitates the systematic analysis, comparison, and design of distributed-ledger-based identity solutions, as demonstrated through its application to two distinct architectures. As the first methodology-driven taxonomy in this field, this work advances standardization and enhances understanding of distributed-ledger-based identity architectures. It provides researchers and practitioners with a structured framework for evaluating design decisions and implementation approaches.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Governance of Ledger-Anchored Decentralized Identifiers

A Decentralized Identifier (DID) empowers an entity to prove control over a unique and self-issued identifier without relying on any identity provider. The public key material for the proof is encoded into an associated DID document (DDO). This is preferable shared via a distributed ledger because it guarantees algorithmically that everyone has access to the latest state of any tamper-proof DDO but only the entities in control of a DID are able to update theirs. Yet, it is possible to grant deputies the authority to update the DDO on behalf of the DID owner. However, the DID specification leaves largely open on how authorizations over a DDO are managed and enforced among multiple deputies. This article investigates what it means to govern a DID and discusses various forms of how a DID can be controlled by potentially more than one entity. It also presents a prototype of a DID-conform identifier management system where a selected set of governance policies are deployed as Smart Contracts. The article highlights the critical role of governance for the trustworthy and flexible deployment of ledger-anchored DIDs across various domains.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2024

DID Link: Authentication in TLS with Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials

Authentication in TLS is predominately carried out with X.509 digital certificates issued by certificate authorities (CA). The centralized nature of current public key infrastructures, however, comes along with severe risks, such as single points of failure and susceptibility to cyber-attacks, potentially undermining the security and trustworthiness of the entire system. With Decentralized Identifiers (DID) alongside distributed ledger technology, it becomes technically feasible to prove ownership of a unique identifier without requiring an attestation of the proof's public key by a centralized and therefore vulnerable CA. This article presents DID Link, a novel authentication scheme for TLS 1.3 that empowers entities to authenticate in a TLS-compliant way with self-issued X.509 certificates that are equipped with ledger-anchored DIDs instead of CA-issued identifiers. It facilitates the exchange of tamper-proof and 3rd-party attested claims in the form of DID-bound Verifiable Credentials after the TLS handshake to complete the authentication with a full identification of the communication partner. A prototypical implementation shows comparable TLS handshake durations of DID Link if verification material is cached and reasonable prolongations if it is obtained from a ledger. The significant speed improvement of the resulting TLS channel over a widely used, DID-based alternative transport protocol on the application layer demonstrates the potential of DID Link to become a viable solution for the establishment of secure and trustful end-to-end communication links with decentrally managed digital identities.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Beyond Certificates: 6G-ready Access Control for the Service-Based Architecture with Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials

Next generation mobile networks are poised to transition from monolithic structures owned and operated by single mobile network operators into multi-stakeholder networks where various parties contribute with infrastructure, resources, and services. However, a federation of networks and services brings along a crucial challenge: Guaranteeing secure and trustworthy access control among network entities of different administrative domains. This paper introduces a novel technical concept and a prototype, outlining and implementing a 5G Service-Based Architecture that utilizes Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials instead of traditional X.509 certificates and OAuth2.0 access tokens to authenticate and authorize network functions among each other across administrative domains. This decentralized approach to identity and permission management for network functions reduces the risk of single points of failure associated with centralized public key infrastructures. It unifies access control mechanisms and lays the groundwork for lesser complex and more trustful cross-domain key management for highly collaborative network functions in a multi-party Service-Based Architecture of 6G.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2022

Development Frameworks for Microservice-based Applications: Evaluation and Comparison

The microservice architectural style has gained much attention from both academia and industry recently as a novel way to design, develop, and deploy cloud-native applications. This concept encourages the decomposition of a monolith into multiple independently deployable units. A typical microservices-based application is formed of two service types: functional services, which provide the core business logic, and infrastructure services, which provide essential functionalities for a microservices ecosystem. To improve developers' productivity, many software frameworks have been developed to provide those reusable infrastructure services, allowing programmers to focus on implementing microservices in arbitrary ways. In this work, we made use of four open source frameworks to develop a cloud-based application in order to compare and evaluate their usability and practicability. While all selected frameworks promote asynchronous microservice design in general, there are differences in the ways each implements services. This leads to interoperability issues, such as message topic naming convention. Additionally, a key finding is the long startup times of JVM-based services that might reduce application's resiliency and portability. Some other advantages come directly from the programming language, such as the ability of Go to generate native binary executables, which results in very small and compact Docker images (up to 78\% smaller compared to other languages).

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

Towards Decentralized Identity Management in Multi-stakeholder 6G Networks

Trust-building mechanisms among network entities of different administrative domains will gain significant importance in 6G because a future mobile network will be operated cooperatively by a variety of different stakeholders rather than by a single mobile network operator. The use of trusted third party issued certificates for initial trust establishment in multi-stakeholder 6G networks is only advisable to a limited extent, as trusted third parties not only represent single point of failures or attacks, but they also cannot guarantee global independence due to national legislation and regulatory or political influence. This article proposes to decentralize identity management in 6G networks to enable secure mutual authentication between network entities of different trust domains without relying on a trusted third party and to empower network entities with the ability to shape and strengthen cross-domain trust relationships by the exchange of verifiable credentials. A reference model for decentralized identity management in 6G is given as an initial guide for the fundamental design of a common identity management system whose operation and governance are distributed equally across multiple trust domains of interconnected and multi-stakeholder 6G ecosystems.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

Decentralized Identifiers and Self-sovereign Identity in 6G

A key challenge for mobile network operators in 6G is to bring together and orchestrate a variety of new emerging players of today's mobile ecosystems in order to provide economically viable and seamless mobile connectivity in form of a multi-stakeholder service. With each new player, be it a cloud, edge or hardware provider, the need for interfaces with secure authentication and authorization mechanisms increases, as does the complexity and operational costs of the public key infrastructures required for the identity and key management. While today's centralized public key infrastructures have proven to be technically feasible in confined and trusted spaces, they do not provide the required security for access control once centralized identity providers must be avoided because of limited cross-domain interoperability, national data protection legislation, or geopolitical-strategic reasons. Recent decentralized identity management concepts, such as the W3C recommendation of Decentralized Identifiers, provide a secure, tamper-proof, and cross-domain identity management alternative for future multi-stakeholder 6G networks without relying on centralized identity provider or certification authorities. This article introduces the concept of Decentralized Identifiers together with the principles of Self-sovereign Identity and discusses opportunities and potential benefits of their application and usage for cross-domain and privacy-preserving identity and key management in 6G networks.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2019

MAIA: A Microservices-based Architecture for Industrial Data Analytics

In recent decades, it has become a significant tendency for industrial manufacturers to adopt decentralization as a new manufacturing paradigm. This enables more efficient operations and facilitates the shift from mass to customized production. At the same time, advances in data analytics give more insights into the production lines, thus improving its overall productivity. The primary objective of this paper is to apply a decentralized architecture to address new challenges in industrial analytics. The main contributions of this work are therefore two-fold: (1) an assessment of the microservices' feasibility in industrial environments, and (2) a microservices-based architecture for industrial data analytics. Also, a prototype has been developed, analyzed, and evaluated, to provide further practical insights. Initial evaluation results of this prototype underpin the adoption of microservices in industrial analytics with less than 20ms end-to-end processing latency for predicting movement paths for 100 autonomous robots on a commodity hardware server. However, it also identifies several drawbacks of the approach, which is, among others, the complexity in structure, leading to higher resource consumption.

cs.DC↗