Self-Sovereign Identities and Content Provenance: VeriTrust—A Blockchain-Based Framework for Fake News Detection

The widespread circulation of digital misinformation exposes a critical shortcoming in prevailing detection strategies, namely, the absence of robust mechanisms to confirm the origin and authenticity of online content. This study addresses this by introducing VeriTrust, a conceptual and provenance-centric framework designed to establish content-level trust by integrating Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), blockchain-based anchoring, and AI-assisted decentralized verification. The proposed system is designed to operate through three key components: (1) issuing Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) through Hyperledger Aries and Indy; (2) anchoring cryptographic hashes of content metadata to an Ethereum-compatible blockchain using Merkle trees and smart contracts; and (3) enabling a community-led verification model enhanced by federated learning with future extensibility toward zero-knowledge proof techniques. Theoretical projections, derived from established performance benchmarks, suggest the framework offers low latency and high scalability for content anchoring and minimal on-chain transaction fees. It also prioritizes user privacy by ensuring no on-chain exposure of personal data. VeriTrust redefines misinformation mitigation by shifting from reactive content-based classification to proactive provenance-based verification, forming a verifiable link between digital content and its creator. VeriTrust, while currently at the conceptual and theoretical validation stage, holds promise for enhancing transparency, accountability, and resilience against misinformation attacks across journalism, academia, and online platforms.