Verifiable Credentials Demo

Demonstrates how to issue and verify Verifiable Credentials.

WARNING: No part of this demo should be used in production systems. Generated private keys are not encrypted by default.

System Requirements

• A 64-bit system
• git >= v2.x
• docker >= 18.x

Getting Started

Running this demo consists of:

1. Cloning the repository.
2. Getting a GitHub Personal Access Token.
3. Generating a public/private keypair.
4. Issuing a Verifiable Credential.
5. Verifying the Verifiable Credential.

Cloning the Repository

git clone https://github.com/digitalbazaar/vc-demo.git
cd vc-demo

Create an Alias

The rest of this demo assumes that you have created the following command line alias:

alias vc='docker run -i -v $(pwd):/home/node/app/key-file digitalbazaar/vc-js-cli'

Getting a GitHub Personal Access Token

This demo will publish newly generated key and controller documents as a gists under your GitHub account. This requires a GitHub Personal Access Token with only the gist scope enabled.

Generate a keypair

You will need to generate a public-private keypair to run this demo. Once the keypair is created, the public key will be published to a gist under your GitHub account using the GitHub Personal Access Token you created in the previous step. The private key information as well as where the public key was published will be saved locally as my-key.json.

Generate an Ed25519 keypair

vc keygen --key-type ed25519 --git-hub-token YOUR_GITHUB_TOKEN > my-key.json

Generate a Secp256k1 keypair

vc keygen --key-type secp256k1 --git-hub-token YOUR_GITHUB_TOKEN > my-key.json

Issue a Verifiable Credential

Once your keypair has been generated and the public information has been published, you can use it to issue Verifiable Credentials.

The credentials directory stores a number of template credentials that can be used with the issue command. To issue a Verifiable Credential, you can execute the following command:

vc issue --key my-key.json < credentials/alumni.jsonld > alumni-signed.jsonld

The command above will create a file called alumni-signed.jsonld, consisting of the issued Verifiable Credential.

Verify a Verifiable Credential

To verify a Verifiable Credential, the following command can be used:

vc verify < alumni-signed.jsonld

The verification result will be printed to the screen.