Independent Verification

DRS chains can be verified by anyone, without contacting the operator, without a DRS account, and without any central authority.

What you need

  • The DRS bundle (the JWT strings)
  • The drs verify CLI (from @drs/sdk) or a running drs-verify instance

What you do NOT need

  • Access to the operator's systems or databases
  • A DRS account or subscription
  • Network access to the original issuer
  • Any trusted third party to authenticate the evidence

Why this works

Each Delegation Receipt is signed with the issuer's Ed25519 private key. The issuer's public key is encoded directly in their did:key DID:

did:key:z6Mk{base58btc(multicodec_prefix + public_key_bytes)}

Anyone with the DID can derive the public key and verify the signature. No registry lookup, no HTTP request, no trust anchor beyond the public key.

Offline verification

All blocks except F (revocation) can be run offline:

pnpm exec drs verify bundle.json --offline

The --offline flag skips Block F (Bitstring Status List lookup). All cryptographic, structural, policy, and temporal checks run locally with no network calls.

Use --offline when:

  • You have no network access
  • You are verifying historical evidence (revocation status is not relevant for a past action)
  • You distrust the network path to the status list server

Full online verification

DRS_VERIFY_URL=http://your-drs-verify-instance:8080 pnpm exec drs verify bundle.json

Or spin up your own drs-verify instance and point at it:

cd drs-verify && go run ./cmd/server &
pnpm exec drs verify bundle.json

Checking signatures manually

If you want to verify a signature without the CLI tools, every DRS JWT is a standard EdDSA JWT. Any JWT library that supports alg: EdDSA can verify it:

# Decode and verify using jwt.io or any EdDSA-capable tool
# The DID in the "iss" field encodes the public key:
# did:key:z6Mk{base58(0xed01 + pub_key_bytes)}

# Extract pub key from DID:
echo "did:key:z6Mk..." | pnpm exec drs resolve-did
# {"public_key_hex": "0102030405..."}