What are Verifiable Credentials and how does it work ?

What is a Credential ?

A credential is a proof of something about yourself.

Example : your passport

Problems with types of credentials available today ?

Easy to Replicate or Fake

Can be easily damaged or lost

Expensive to Create or issue

Can’t be scaled

Are not really easy to verify

Oversharing of information (example so many extra info like address,father’s name on your driving licence)

What are verifiable Credentials ?

Digital attestation or verification of your credentials or the credentials you own by another identity owner . Example : Government issued you a driving licence .Here , your driving licence is your verifiable credential. and police will verify it with the help of digital signatures. here,police is another identity owner.

Verifiable Credentials are digital credentials . you can carry them on your phone.

Originated from world wide web consortium

Who is an identity owner ?

A person who has full control over is digital identity or self-sovereign identity.

Pros of Having verifiable credentials ?

All Digital

Under true owner’s control

Much harder to fake

High scalability

Much harder to impersonate

Minimum information disclosure

Zero-knowledge proof enabled

Encrypted

Useless if ever stolen by thieves

Workflow explain

Participants :

Issuer := They create and issue credentials . example passport authority

Holder := They receive ,hold and share credentials .example Tony

Verifier := They receive and verify credentials .example your College admin department.

Here : verifiable credentials = Driving licence , Issuer = Driving licence authority (DLA) , Verifier = Police

Flow

Issuer :

DLA(Driving licence authority) will publish its DID and verkey on blockchain so that everyone will be aware of the did of DLA which will be issuing Driving licence to people .

DLA will also publish a schema called credential definition on blockchain so that everyone will have info about the attributes which will present on verifiable credential (driving licence). For example : schema of my driving licence is : firstName , lastName,father’s Name , DL number ,Address

They can also revoke credentials if they want . and that too will be published on blockchain. example your driving licence get expired and they revoked it.so the police will easily be able to see on blockchain that this Driving licence is expired

So till now we know that DLA will be using the given DID to issue all the Driving licences .

Holder :

Here Tony is a holder or subject who will hold the licence.

DLA will issue driving licence to Tony by signing it digitally.

Tony will store its verifiable credentials in his DID wallet.

and the main benefit is that ,now tony has control over his verifiable credentials. say there are 10 attributes on verifiable credentials but Tony only wants to share driving licence number than he can hide other 9 variables.

Verifier :

Tony was asked by the police to show his Driving licence (verifiable credentials) .

Tony will only share the digital signatures to police and will hide all the 10 attributes from them .

Police will go to blockchain and verify if the signatures on Driving licence are actually correct and this Driving licence is issued by DLA.

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email : sethi.shivam27@gmail.com