Identity issuer registries can strengthen VCs for LERs: reports

A year into a research collaboration, the Digital Credentials Consortium (DCC) and Credential Engine have published a pair of reports on the governance of identity issuer registries and how they can help trust and verification of W3C Verifiable Credentials for Learning and Employment Records (LERs).

W3C’s VCs play a growing role in identity verification processes, and also make LERs more privacy preserving, data rich and secure, according to a blog post from the DCC. As their use expands, questions like how a relying party can be confident that the listed issuer of a credential is not an impersonator are arising.

The two new papers, the Issuer Identity Registry Research Report and Governance Framework for Issuer Identity Registries, address how to answer this question.

Verifiers in the LER ecosystem can use issuer registries to check the validity of the credential, but also to see if the issuer is a known entity, providing additional trust and security.

The 44-page Research Report provides practical guidance on implementing W3C VCs with OpenID Federation, DIDs and the Credential Transparency Description Language (CTDL). The 11-page Governance Framework shares practices to help implementers ensure their registry operations are transparent and accountable.

Verifiable Credentials 2.0 were accepted as a W3C standard just a month ago.

Article Topics

Digital Credentials Consortium (DCC)  |  digital identity  |  verifiable credentials  |  W3C