Glossary

Digital Credentials API — The browser feature at the centre of this work. It lets a website ask the browser for a credential from a wallet on the same device. The browser mediates: it finds the wallets, shows the chooser, and handles consent, so the website never learns what wallets you have unless you choose to use one.

Wallet — The app holding the credential. On a phone this is usually the built-in platform wallet, sometimes a government or bank app.

mDL — Mobile driving licence. A digital driver licence issued by a road agency into a wallet, in a standard format so that any conforming verifier can read it.

mdoc — The underlying data format an mDL uses. Used here interchangeably with mDL where the distinction does not matter.

Verifier — The party asking to read a credential. In the connector pattern this is the Connector, which is the source of most of what is on Limitations.

Relying party — The business that wants to know who you are: the merchant, the bank, the service. In the connector pattern it never speaks to the wallet.

Issuing authority — The body that issued the credential and signed it, such as a state road agency. Its signature is what makes the data trustworthy.

Selective disclosure — Revealing one fact from a credential without revealing the rest. Proving you are over eighteen without disclosing your birthday.

Signed transcript — A record of the exchange, signed by the phone at the moment of presentation, covering who asked. It stops a captured response being replayed somewhere else, and it is why the response is bound to the Connector rather than to the relying party.

Reader credentials — The certificates a verifier presents to prove it is authorised to read a credential. Obtaining them is a gate controlled by the issuing authority or wallet vendor, not by the verifier.

Trust list — The list of issuing authorities a verifier is willing to accept credentials from. Somebody has to maintain it and decide what goes on it.

NASCAR screen — The industry's own nickname for a screen full of provider logos to choose between, after the livery on a racing car. The ConnectID chooser is one. It is rendered by the relying party, in the relying party's page, from a component ConnectID supplies.

Federation — An arrangement in which many organisations prove who they are by chaining their identity to one trusted root, rather than by registering with each other pairwise. ConnectID runs one: every relying party and provider carries an identity statement that chains up to ConnectID.

Trust Controller — The root of that federation. ConnectID's actual role in this flow: it signs things that let participants prove membership and entitlement, and it signs the credential request on the relying party's behalf. It does not route data and never sees the wallet's response.

Trust chain — The sequence of signed statements linking one participant back to the Trust Controller. Resolving it answers "is this party a member, and what may it ask for?"

DCQL — The query language a credential request is written in: which credential, which fields. It is what the Trust Controller signs, on the relying party's behalf.

Signed request — A credential request carrying a signature the wallet can check against a trust framework, so the wallet can know who is asking beyond what the browser tells it about the origin. Available on the protocol Android uses; the iPhone path has no equivalent.

Selective disclosure vs. minimisation — Related but distinct. Selective disclosure is the capability; minimisation is the discipline of using it. The technology gives you the first for free and cannot give you the second.

Assurance — How much confidence there is that the person in front of you is who the credential says. A credential presentation and an identity verification are not the same thing, which is the subject of the chooser implies an equivalence that does not hold.