SLVC-DIDA: Signature-less Verifiable Credential-based Issuer-hiding and Multi-party Authentication for Decentralized Identity
Abstract
As an emerging paradigm in digital identity, Decentralized Identity (DID) appears advantages over traditional identity management methods in a variety of aspects, e.g., enhancing user-centric online services and ensuring complete user autonomy and control. Verifiable Credential (VC) techniques are used to facilitate decentralized DID-based access control across multiple entities. However, existing DID schemes generally rely on a distributed public key infrastructure that also causes challenges, such as context information deduction, key exposure, and issuer data leakage. To address the issues above, this paper proposes a issuer-hiding and privacy-preserving DID multi-party authentication model with a signature-less VC scheme, named SLVC-DIDA, for the first time. Our proposed scheme avoids the dependence on signing keys by employing hashing and issuer membership proofs, which supports universal zero-knowledge multi-party DID authentications, eliminating additional technical integrations. We adopt a novel zero-knowledge circuit to maintain the anonymity of the issuer set, thereby enabling public verification while safeguarding the privacy of identity attributes via a Merkle tree-based VC list. Furthermore, by eliminating reliance on a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), SLVC-DIDA enables decentralized and self-sovereign DID authentication. Our experiments further evaluate the effectiveness and practicality of SLVC-DIDA.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2501.11052,
title = {SLVC-DIDA: Signature-less Verifiable Credential-based Issuer-hiding and Multi-party Authentication for Decentralized Identity},
author = {Tianxiu Xie and Keke Gai and Jing Yu and Liehuang Zhu and Bin Xiao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.11052},
year = {2026}
}