A Secure and Privacy-Aware Hybrid Framework for Digital Credential Verification

Abstract: In most organizations, identity is still checked against a central database. This is convenient to run. The catch is that one party ends up owning the records, and people must keep uploading the same documents every time they sign up for something new. In this paper we propose a hybrid framework that uses a blockchain for one job only: keeping a shared record of trust. Each issuer and holder gets a decentralized identifier (DID), and the claims go inside verifiable credentials (VCs). For every credential, a smart contract stores just its hash and its status, so nothing personal is written on the chain. We describe the architecture, follow a credential from issue to revocation, give an eight-step verification algorithm, and discuss the threats and a test plan. We have not built the prototype yet, so no performance numbers appear here; we will report them after we have measured them.

Keywords: blockchain, decentralized identifiers, digital identity, privacy, self-sovereign identity, verifiable credentials