On the interoperability of verifiable credentials: simple universal verifier (SUV)

A digital identity is a digital representation of an individual’s identity. In the era of the Internet, it becomes increasingly important to adopt a digital identity format that is cryptographically secure and privacy-preserving. Indeed, a digital identity has the potential to offer better privacy protection than a physical identity document, where users are forced to disclose more information when presenting their identity documents than what is actually needed. Nevertheless, digital identities have not come without their own set of new challenges. One of the key issues to fully adopting digital identities is the lack of standards—both for the format of digital identities and the protocols for transferring them. This paper discusses the various formats and protocols currently used in the digital identity market. Then it introduces the Simple Universal Verifier (SUV) as an approach to tackle the current lack of interoperability for the verification phase. The SUV has been implemented and used to integrate a Relying Party (RP) with Microsoft and Identiproof Verifiable Credentials platforms and also integrates with the TRAIN trust management infrastructure.