How to write verifiable credentials in golang
2 min readMar 9, 2021
What is SSI (Self-sovereign identity)?
- SSI is a term used to describe the digital movement that recognizes an individual should own and control their identity without the intervening administrative authorities.
- SSI allows people to interact in the digital world with the same freedom and capacity for trust as they do in the offline world.
SSI Benefits:
- Eliminates the effort of collecting documents that have already been collected
- Allows to deliver only the information that is approved to receive
- Establish a cryptographically secure distributed ledger recording transactions that prevents modification
- No need to store personal data in a central repository
- ”No one owns, everyone has access”
What is a credential ?
A qualification, achievement, quality, or aspect of a person’s background, especially when used to indicate their suitability for something.
It may consist of:
- Information related to identifying the subject of the credential
- Information related to the issuing authority
- Information related to the type of credential this is
- Information related to specific attributes or properties being asserted by the issuing authority about the subject
- Evidence related to how the credential was derived
- Information related to constraints on the credential
What is a verifiable credential?
- It can represent the same information as a physical credential.
But also it
- Includes digital signatures which makes them more trustworthy
- Can generate verifiable presentations that proof the holder holds the credential with the certain information
- Could be transmitted rapidly
How to write a verifiable credential in golang?
Note: the code is written following the Verifiable Credentials Data Model 1.0
First, we define a struct of verifiable credential:
then, we add a struct of a presentation:
We will create four methods to create / verify a credential / presentation.
- Create a credential:
2. Verify a credential:
3. Create a presentation:
4. and finally, verify a presentation:
You can find full code here: https://github.com/ringaile/ver-cred