About the validator

The validator is a core service in the Vidos ecosystem that validates digital credentials and presentations according to relying party requirements and organizational policies. It ensures that credentials meet specific business requirements, come from trusted issuers, and satisfy presentation constraints from the perspective of the relying party, providing a critical trust layer for acceptance workflows.

Why use a validator?

The validator provides automated validation of digital credentials against relying party requirements:

• Policy-based validation against configurable acceptance criteria
• Trusted issuer verification ensuring credentials come from approved sources
• Presentation compliance checking that submissions meet requirements
• Format validation ensuring credentials conform to expected structures

What is a validator?

A validator assesses whether digital credentials and presentations meet the relying party’s acceptance criteria, performing policy checks including format validation, trusted issuer verification, presentation compliance, and business rule validation.

Validator architecture

The Validator in Vidos has two main components that work together to provide validation services:

1. Validator Service: The core implementation that handles the validation process according to configurable policies
2. Validator Management Service: Enables configuration and management of validator instances for different validation needs

Vidos supports creating multiple validator instances, each with its own policy configuration, to support different validation requirements within your organization.

flowchart TD
    A[Applications] --> B[Validator Instance]
    B --> C[Validator Core]
    C --> D[Validation Policies]
    D --- D1[Format]
    D --- D2[Trusted Issuer]
    D --- D3[Presentation]
    D --- D4[...]

The Validator works closely with other Vidos services:

• Receives cryptographically verified credentials from the Verifier service
• Interacts with the Resolver to retrieve issuer information for trust validation
• Provides validation results to the Authorizer for access control decisions

Validation process

The validator performs configurable policy checks: format validation, trusted issuer verification, presentation compliance, schema validation, and business rule validation. Each check can be individually configured or disabled.

Supported standards

• W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model v1.1 and v2.0
• ISO/IEC 18013-5 (mDL)
• IETF Digital Credential specification
• DIF Presentation Exchange
• Digital Credential Query Language (DCQL)

Use cases

• Credential acceptance: Validate credentials meet relying party requirements
• Presentation validation: Ensure submissions satisfy constraints
• Issuer trust verification: Confirm credentials from trusted sources
• Compliance validation: Meet regulatory requirements

Summary

The validator validates credentials and presentations from the relying party’s perspective, applying configurable policies to ensure credentials meet acceptance requirements before use in trust workflows.