Recognition: unknown
COD-ssi: Enforcing Mutual Privacy for Credential Oblivious Disclosure in Self Sovereign Identity
Pith reviewed 2026-05-10 15:21 UTC · model grok-4.3
The pith
The COD-ssi framework uses oblivious pseudorandom functions to let verifiers select specific credential claims without the holder learning which ones were chosen.
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
COD-ssi is a framework that leverages Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions to allow Verifiers to selectively access a subset of claims without revealing which specific claims were accessed to the credential Holder. The security of the solution is formally verified and its feasibility is assessed through the experimental evaluation of an open-source prototype implementation, showing that provable mutual privacy in SSI can be achieved with just moderate computational and communication overhead.
What carries the argument
The Claim Oblivious Disclosure for SSI (COD-ssi) protocol, which composes an Oblivious Pseudorandom Function to mask the verifier's claim selection from the holder.
Load-bearing premise
The underlying Oblivious Pseudorandom Function must deliver the required obliviousness property and the protocol must compose it correctly without introducing leaks under standard cryptographic assumptions.
What would settle it
An experiment or attack in which the credential holder can determine the verifier's chosen claims from the exchanged messages or outputs would falsify the mutual privacy guarantee.
Figures
read the original abstract
The Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) paradigm is instrumental for decentralised identity management, allowing an entity to create, manage, and present their digital credentials without relying on centralised authorities. Credential selective disclosure is one of the most attractive privacy-preserving features of SSI, allowing users to reveal only the minimum necessary information from their credentials. However, current selective disclosure mechanisms primarily focus on protecting the privacy of credential Holders, while offering limited protection to the Verifiers of credentials. Indeed, the specific credential information requested by a Verifier can inadvertently reveal to credential Holders sensitive information, including internal decision-making criteria, business rules, or strategic plans. In this work, we address this threat by proposing, to the best of our knowledge, the first approach that enforces mutual privacy in credential exchanges. To this end, we introduce COD-ssi (Claim Oblivious Disclosure for SSI), a novel framework that leverages Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions to allow Verifiers to selectively access a subset of claims without revealing which specific claims were accessed to the credential Holder. The security of our solution is formally verified and its feasibility is assessed through the experimental evaluation of our open-source prototype implementation. These results show that provable mutual privacy in the context of SSI can be achieved with just moderate computational and communication overhead.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper introduces COD-ssi, a framework that uses Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions (OPRFs) to enforce mutual privacy during credential selective disclosure in Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) systems. Verifiers can obtain a chosen subset of claims while the selection remains hidden from the credential holder. The authors claim that security is formally verified under standard assumptions and demonstrate feasibility through experimental evaluation of an open-source prototype, reporting only moderate computational and communication overhead.
Significance. If the formal verification is sound and the prototype results are reproducible, the work would be significant for decentralized identity research. It addresses an asymmetry in existing SSI selective-disclosure schemes by protecting verifier privacy (business rules, decision criteria) in addition to holder privacy. Reliance on a well-studied OPRF primitive together with an open-source implementation and claimed formal verification are concrete strengths that support reproducibility and allow independent validation.
major comments (2)
- [§4] §4 (Security Analysis): The central claim of provable mutual privacy rests on formal verification, yet the security model (game-based vs. simulation-based), the exact theorem statement, and the reduction steps from the overall protocol to the underlying OPRF security are not provided. Without these details it is impossible to confirm that the OPRF obliviousness property is preserved through the credential encoding and presentation flow.
- [§5] §5 (Prototype Evaluation): The feasibility claim of 'moderate overhead' is load-bearing for practicality, but the abstract and high-level description supply no concrete metrics (latency, communication size, comparison baselines, or hardware platform). This leaves the experimental support for the central contribution only moderately substantiated.
minor comments (2)
- The abstract would be strengthened by a single sentence naming the security model and one or two key performance figures from the prototype.
- [§3] Notation for the OPRF inputs/outputs and the claim-selection vector could be introduced earlier with a small diagram to improve readability of the protocol description.
Simulated Author's Rebuttal
We thank the referee for the constructive and detailed feedback on our manuscript. We address each major comment below and will revise the paper to strengthen the presentation of both the security analysis and the experimental results.
read point-by-point responses
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Referee: [§4] §4 (Security Analysis): The central claim of provable mutual privacy rests on formal verification, yet the security model (game-based vs. simulation-based), the exact theorem statement, and the reduction steps from the overall protocol to the underlying OPRF security are not provided. Without these details it is impossible to confirm that the OPRF obliviousness property is preserved through the credential encoding and presentation flow.
Authors: We agree that the current version of Section 4 does not provide a sufficiently detailed exposition of the security model, theorem statements, or reduction steps. In the revised manuscript we will expand this section to explicitly define the game-based security model, state the formal theorems, and provide the step-by-step reductions showing how the overall protocol security follows from the standard OPRF obliviousness assumption while preserving the claim-oblivious property through the credential encoding and presentation flow. revision: yes
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Referee: [§5] §5 (Prototype Evaluation): The feasibility claim of 'moderate overhead' is load-bearing for practicality, but the abstract and high-level description supply no concrete metrics (latency, communication size, comparison baselines, or hardware platform). This leaves the experimental support for the central contribution only moderately substantiated.
Authors: Section 5 of the manuscript already reports concrete experimental metrics, including latency, communication sizes, hardware platform details, and baseline comparisons. To address the referee's concern about the high-level presentation, we will revise the abstract and introduction to include a concise summary of these key numerical results and the evaluation setup, thereby making the feasibility claims more immediately substantiated. revision: partial
Circularity Check
No significant circularity; construction relies on external OPRF primitive
full rationale
The paper's central construction introduces COD-ssi by composing an established Oblivious Pseudorandom Function primitive with credential presentation flows to achieve mutual privacy. Security is claimed via formal verification under standard cryptographic assumptions on the OPRF, and feasibility is shown via prototype experiments. No derivation step reduces by construction to a fitted parameter, self-defined quantity, or load-bearing self-citation chain; the OPRF obliviousness property is treated as an independent external building block rather than derived internally. The argument is therefore self-contained against external benchmarks.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
axioms (1)
- domain assumption Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions provide the required obliviousness under standard cryptographic assumptions
invented entities (1)
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COD-ssi protocol
no independent evidence
Reference graph
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2025
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