Understanding Verifiable Presentations

Verifiable presentations allow credential holders to selectively disclose information from their credentials when interacting with verifiers. They provide privacy control while preserving trust.

Holders sit between issuers and verifiers (issuers create credentials, holders store them, verifiers validate presentations), controlling what information they share.

Core Concepts

Definition and Purpose

A verifiable presentation is a tamper-evident data structure created by holders to bundle and present credentials (or subsets) to verifiers. Unlike credentials (issued by authorities), presentations are holder-controlled, enabling selective disclosure, credential combination, and contextual sharing.

Relationship to Verifiable Credentials

While verifiable credentials and verifiable presentations share similar security properties (both are tamper-evident and cryptographically verifiable), they serve different functions:

Verifiable Credentials	Verifiable Presentations
Issued by authorities	Created by holders
Long-lived	Typically short-lived
Attest to claims about subjects	Package credentials for verification
Signed by issuers	Signed by holders
Stored by holders	Transmitted to verifiers

A holder can receive multiple verifiable credentials from different issuers and combine relevant parts into a single verifiable presentation to satisfy a verifier’s requirements.

Privacy is fundamental to verifiable presentations. They enable selective disclosure through credential selection, property filtering, derived predicates, and zero-knowledge proofs. These capabilities let holders maintain different personas and share only necessary information.

A verifiable presentation contains presentation metadata, verifiable credentials (or portions), and cryptographic proofs:

{
    "@context": ["https://www.w3.org/ns/credentials/v2"],
    "type": ["VerifiablePresentation"],
    "verifiableCredential": [
        {
            // One or more verifiable credentials
        }
    ],
    "proof": {
        // Cryptographic proof(s)
    }
}

How Verifiable Presentations Work

Holders create presentations by selecting credentials, optionally filtering claims, assembling with metadata, cryptographically signing, and transmitting to verifiers. This preserves original credential properties while adding holder proof of control.

Use Cases

Verifiable presentations enable age verification without revealing birth dates, credential combination from multiple issuers, attribute verification with minimal disclosure, and different personas (professional, medical, governmental) by presenting context-appropriate combinations.

Real-world applications include digital identity systems, healthcare records with privacy controls, educational credentials, financial eligibility verification, and access control.

Privacy and Security Considerations

Verifiable presentations offer data minimization, consent-based sharing, and unlinkability. However, implementers should consider correlation risks from identifiers or signatures, metadata leakage, and proper holder key protection.