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Self Sovereign Credentials

Verifiable Credential

A verifiable credential is nothing but a credential that can be verified by a third party without asking the issuer.

similar to PKI infrastructure

In case of SSL, the certificates issued by a CA is blindly trusted.

But in SSI, the certificate can be verified against a public, distributed record, without asking the issuer again.

ssi-workflow

Credentials are sent in plain text

When credentials such as a degree certificate or drivers license is sent to a verifier, it's sent as plain text. The data itself isn't encrypted.

This is why digital signatures are used for this purpose.

DID

DID stands for Decentralized Identity. Normally identities are centralized which means the credentials are stored on a central server.

  1. DID can already contain a key which already has its public key information.
  2. Or the Information can be stored in a block chain and can be fetched using the ID.
  3. Or the information can be stored in a central registry.