The OpenID Foundation is pleased to share its new whitepaper, “OpenID for Verifiable Credentials”. The goal of this whitepaper is to inform and educate the readers about the work on the OpenID for Verifiable Credentials (OpenID4VC) specifications family. It addresses use-cases referred to as Self-Sovereign Identity, Decentralized Identity, or User-Centric Identity.

The work is being conducted in the OpenID Foundation, in liaison with the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) and with working groups in International Organization for Standardization (ISO), namely ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 17 Cards and security devices for personal identification. This has enabled working towards aligning ISO-compliant mobile driving licences with W3C verifiable credentials data model, which has been one area of particular interest for the ecosystem.

The whitepaper targets private and public sector decision-makers, architects and implementers interested in the concepts, use-cases and architecture where the End-User directly receives credentials from the Issuer and directly presents them to the Verifier using verifiable credentials. It is important to note that verifiable credentials are not only limited to credentials expressed using W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model, but also identity credentials expressed using other data models.

We wish to thank all the contributors that reviewed and provided feedback, notably the contributors to the OpenID for Verifiable Credentials, which is part of the OpenID Connect Working Group.

The whitepaper can be downloaded here. As this paper is an “ 2nd Editors Draft”, we encourage you to share it and welcome feedback directed to director@oidf.org so that the lead editors can evolve the paper based on community feedback.

To learn more about the OpenID Connect Working Group and the OpenID for Verifiable Credentials, including how to get involved and contribute, please visit: https://openid.net/wg/connect/.