Verify a Verifiable Credential

This tutorial offers step-by-step guidance on how to verify a JSON credential, encoded as a JWT (JSON Web Token), a W3C compliant proof format.

⚠️ Before you begin...

Make sure you've correctly configured the cheqd plugin's agent settings for Veramo CLI

Instructions

This tutorial assumes you have already issued a JSON/JWT Verifiable Credential so that it can be cryptographically verified as untampered.

Call Veramo's credential verify function

If you have the issued Verifiable Credential stored in a file, say, cred.json, pass it to the credential verify function:

cat cred.json | veramo credential verify

Instead of piping the file like above, you can also verify the credential using the raw credential or JWT as follows:

veramo credential verify --raw

Then enter the JWT or entire JSON credential including the JWT.

Check credential verification output

If the credential can be verified correctly, the response will be:

Credential verified successfully

Credential verification is done by decoding the JWT proof and checking if it's tampered or not. Feel free to test this yourself by tampering with the jwt contents in the credential:

Credential could not be verified

🤨 Troubleshoot verifying JWT credentials

If you belive you did everything right(created a verifiable credential and you did not tamper it), and for some reason you're getting

Credential could not be verified

You can fix it the following way

• First, make sure you are using a node with version 16 or above.

• Second, change Veramo CLI version to @veramo/cli@latest -g as previous versions cause few issues in verification. This will override the previous version you have installed.

    npm i @veramo/cli@latest -g

• Run command below to verify your JWT credential.

veramo credential verify -r <enter-the-JWT-here>

Next steps

Look into how this credential can be shown to others through Verifiable Presentations.