Policy-Driven Contract Negotiation using ODRL and Verifiable Credentials

16 pages•Published: October 28, 2026

Abstract

Data Space participants need to automate data access decisions across organizations without pre-established trust relationships while still meeting compliance, sovereignty, and data governance requirements. However, current implementations often leave a gap between what the policy requires (expressed as constraints) and how the Consumer can consistently select and present the right credentials in a standards-based way. We propose a concrete, interoperable approach to contract negotiation between a Consumer and a Provider in a Data Space where access to data or services is governed by an ODRL policy whose evaluated values are expressed as Verifiable Credential (VC) claims. The Provider publishes an ODRL Offer policy using the ODRL Verifiable Credential (ODRL-VC) Profile. During negotiation, the Consumer proves compliance by presenting the required credentials from a Wallet. To follow current widely adopted standards, the Provider acts as an OpenID for Verifiable Presentations (OpenID4VP) Verifier and requests the required credentials using Digital Credentials Query Language (DCQL). We define a protocol that: (i) derives DCQL requests from ODRL-VC constraints and (ii) binds presentations to the negotiation context.

Keyphrases: attribute based access control, credential exchange, odrl, policy evaluation, verifiable credentials

In: Andrea Cimmino Arriaga, Beatriz Esteves, Nicoletta Fornara and Víctor Rodríguez Doncel (editors). Proceedings of 2nd Workshop ODRL and Beyond: Practical Applications and challenges for poLicy-base access and usage control, OPAL 2026, vol 113, pages 72-87.

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/9R59l
	https://doi.org/10.29007/l6tn

BibTeX entry

@inproceedings{OPAL2026:Policy_Driven_Contract_Negotiation,
  author    = {Yassir Sellami},
  title     = {Policy-Driven Contract Negotiation using ODRL and Verifiable Credentials},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of 2nd Workshop ODRL and Beyond: Practical Applications and challenges for poLicy-base access and usage control, OPAL 2026},
  editor    = {Andrea Cimmino Arriaga and Beatriz Esteves and Nicoletta Fornara and Víctor Rodríguez Doncel},
  series    = {EPiC Series in Computing},
  volume    = {113},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2398-7340},
  url       = {/publications/paper/9R59l},
  doi       = {10.29007/l6tn},
  pages     = {72-87},
  year      = {2026}}

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