Verifying credentials

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Credential verification is the process of confirming that claims about an entity, such as identity, qualifications, memberships, or authorizations, are authentic and trustworthy.

Traditional verification methods rely on physical documents, such as driver’s licenses, diplomas, and certificates, or on centralized databases that verifiers must query directly. These approaches introduce several challenges:

Physical documents can be lost or forged.
Database-based verification can raise privacy concerns by exposing when and where verification occurs.
In many cases, more information is shared than is necessary for the specific verification purpose.
Verifiers must also establish trust relationships with each issuing authority, which makes cross-border and cross-industry verification complex and costly.

Digital credentials address these challenges by providing cryptographically verifiable, tamper-evident representations of claims that can be verified without contacting the issuer. The credential holder stores credentials in a digital wallet and controls how they are presented, including selectively disclosing only the information required for a given verification scenario.

Verifiers can cryptographically confirm the authenticity and integrity of the presented credentials, verify that they were issued by a trusted authority. They can also check the revocation status without creating a centralized tracking point or requiring real-time communication with the issuer.