SD-JWT-based Verifiable Digital Credentials (SD-JWT VC)
draft-ietf-oauth-sd-jwt-vc-17

# Document Shepherd Write-Up for draft-ietf-oauth-sd-jwt-vc-16

## Document History

### 1. Does the working group (WG) consensus represent the strong concurrence of a few individuals, with others being silent, or did it reach broad agreement?

The document reached broad agreement among the active participants who reviewed and discussed it in the OAuth Working Group.

### 2. Was there controversy about particular points, or were there decisions where the consensus was particularly rough?

There were heated discussions about Section 2.5, “Issuer Verification Key Discovery and Validation,” where earlier draft versions also included a W3C DID-based method. The work on the document was delayed after the authors made changes to the specification without prior discussion in, or consensus from, the working group. These issues were eventually resolved through off-list conversations.

### 3. Has anyone threatened an appeal or otherwise indicated extreme discontent?

Appeals were threatened, and strong dissatisfaction was expressed during the discussions. These concerns have since been resolved.

### 4. For protocol documents, are there existing implementations of the contents of the document? Have a significant number of potential implementers indicated plans to implement? Are any existing implementations reported somewhere, either in the document itself (as RFC 7942 recommends) or elsewhere (where)?

Yes. There are existing implementations and clear evidence of implementation interest.

Implementation status is not described in a dedicated RFC 7942 section in the draft itself, but it has been reported on the OAuth WG mailing list:

- Takahiko Kawasaki reported that the open-source Java SD-JWT library can generate VCs compliant with the SD-JWT VC specification, and that Authlete can issue compliant VCs using OID4VCI:
- Brian Campbell reported that SD-JWT VC was included in the February 2026 EU draft implementing acts for the European Digital Identity Wallet, which is not itself an implementation but is strong ecosystem evidence:
- Oliver Terbu reported additional open-source implementations, including EUDI wallet libraries, walt.id support, and an OpenWallet Foundation Labs .NET implementation:  and

Representative implementation links mentioned in those threads are:

-
-
-
-
-
-
-

## Additional Reviews

### 5. Do the contents of this document closely interact with technologies in other IETF working groups or external organizations, and would it therefore benefit from their review? Have those reviews occurred? If yes, describe which reviews took place.

The document is primarily in the OAuth space and has received review from people with the relevant expertise in the OAuth Working Group. It also has ecosystem relevance to related work in the OpenID Foundation and to the European Digital Identity Wallet ecosystem, but those groups have closely followed the work and some of the authors/working group members are active in the OpenID Foundation and in the discussions related to the Wallet ecosystem.


### 6. Describe how the document meets any required formal expert review criteria, such as the MIB Doctor, YANG Doctor, media type, and URI type reviews.

The document does not contain a MIB module or a YANG module.

The document does define:

- an entry for the JSON Web Token Claims registry
- a media type registration for `application/dc+sd-jwt`, and
- a well-known URI registration for `jwt-vc-issuer`.

The registration templates are present in the IANA considerations section and appear complete and consistent with the body of the draft.

### 7. If the document contains a YANG module, has the final version of the module been checked with any of the recommended validation tools for syntax and formatting validation? If there are any resulting errors or warnings, what is the justification for not fixing them at this time? Does the YANG module comply with the Network Management Datastore Architecture (NMDA) as specified in RFC 8342?

Not applicable. The document does not contain a YANG module.


### 8. Describe reviews and automated checks performed to validate sections of the final version of the document written in a formal language, such as XML code, BNF rules, MIB definitions, CBOR's CDDL, etc.

The document does not contain sections in a formal language such as YANG, MIB, ABNF, CDDL, or XML schema that would require specialized automated validation.

The document does, however, contain many examples and those examples are in JSON. Most of the examples are valid expect for the examples in Figure 15, which is only a JSON snippet, and in Figure 22 where  the portrait claim value is a JSON string splitting across lines due to the 72 character line limit.

## Document Shepherd Checks

### 9. Based on the shepherd's review of the document, is it their opinion that this document is needed, clearly written, complete, correctly designed, and ready to be handed off to the responsible Area Director?

Yes.

The shepherd believes the document is needed, sufficiently clear, technically mature, and ready to be handed off. The shepherd reviewed the document in detail and also sent a shepherd review to the working group during April 2026. That review focused mainly on clarity, terminology consistency, structure, and section naming; the document has improved in those areas.

### 10. Several IETF Areas have assembled lists of common issues that their reviewers encounter. For which areas have such issues been identified and addressed? For which does this still need to happen in subsequent reviews?

The document is mainly a security area document. The shepherd specifically looked at common security issues, including:

- clear distinction between inherited SD-JWT processing and SD-JWT-VC-specific profiling,
- trust-model clarity for issuer key discovery and validation,
- integrity and retrieval of externally referenced metadata,
- SSRF-related risks from dereferencing external resources,
- privacy considerations, and
- consistency of terminology and examples.

Those issues have been addressed to a reasonable degree in the current document. No specific remaining area-review gap is known to the shepherd.

### 11. What type of RFC publication is being requested on the IETF stream (Best Current Practice, Proposed Standard, Internet Standard, Informational, Experimental or Historic)? Why is this the proper type of RFC? Do all Datatracker state attributes correctly reflect this intent?

The requested publication type is **Proposed Standard** on the IETF stream.

That is the proper type because the document defines interoperable data formats, metadata formats, validation and processing rules, and IANA registrations intended for deployment and interoperation.


### 12. Have reasonable efforts been made to remind all authors of the intellectual property rights (IPR) disclosure obligations described in BCP 79? To the best of your knowledge, have all required disclosures been filed? If not, explain why. If yes, summarize any relevant discussion, including links to publicly-available messages when applicable.

Yes. Reasonable efforts were made. The shepherd explicitly asked the authors on the OAuth WG mailing list to confirm compliance with the BCP 78 / BCP 79 disclosure obligations and to indicate whether they were aware of any IPR associated with the document.

All authors responsed and are not aware of any IPR associated with this document.

Links:
- Brian Campbell:
- Oliver Terbu:
- Daniel Fett:


### 13. Has each author, editor, and contributor shown their willingness to be listed as such? If the total number of authors and editors on the front page is greater than five, please provide a justification.

Yes. All listed authors confirmed their willingness to be listed.

- Brian Campbell:
- Oliver Terbu:
- Daniel Fett:


### 14. Document any remaining I-D nits in this document. Simply running the idnits tool is not enough; please review the "Content Guidelines" on authors.ietf.org. (Also note that the current idnits tool generates some incorrect warnings; a rewrite is underway.)

No remaining blocking I-D nits are known to the shepherd.

The shepherd manually reviewed the front matter, boilerplate, references structure, and IANA considerations for obvious issues. The document still contains lines that are too long. The shepherd expects those to be fixed in AUTH48. RFC 5785 could also be replaced by RFC 8615.

### 15. Should any informative references be normative or vice-versa? See the IESG Statement on Normative and Informative References.

The current normative/informative split appears correct. The shepherd is not aware of any reference that clearly belongs in the opposite category.

### 16. List any normative references that are not freely available to anyone. Did the community have sufficient access to review any such normative references?

None. The normative references are to publicly available RFCs and freely available W3C specifications.

### 17. Are there any normative downward references (see RFC 3967 and BCP 97) that are not already listed in the DOWNREF registry? If so, list them.

No normative downward references were identified.

### 18. Are there normative references to documents that are not ready to be submitted to the IESG for publication or are otherwise in an unclear state? If so, what is the plan for their completion?

No. The normative references are to published and stable specifications.

### 19. Will publication of this document change the status of any existing RFCs? If so, does the Datatracker metadata correctly reflect this and are those RFCs listed on the title page, in the abstract, and discussed in the introduction? If not, explain why and point to the part of the document where the relationship of this document to these other RFCs is discussed.

No. Publication of this document will not change the status of any existing RFCs.

### 20. Describe the document shepherd's review of the IANA considerations section, especially with regard to its consistency with the body of the document. Confirm that all aspects of the document requiring IANA assignments are associated with the appropriate reservations in IANA registries. Confirm that any referenced IANA registries have been clearly identified. Confirm that each newly created IANA registry specifies its initial contents, allocations procedures, and a reasonable name (see RFC 8126).

The shepherd reviewed the IANA considerations section and found it consistent with the body of the document.

These requests correspond to mechanisms defined in the document body, and the referenced IANA registries are clearly identified.

The document does not create a new IANA registry.

### 21. List any new IANA registries that require Designated Expert Review for future allocations. Are the instructions to the Designated Expert clear? Please include suggestions of designated experts, if appropriate.

None. The document does not create any new IANA registries.

## Reference Links

- Datatracker page:

# Document Shepherd Write-Up for draft-ietf-oauth-sd-jwt-vc-16

## Document History

### 1. Does the working group (WG) consensus represent the strong concurrence of a few individuals, with others being silent, or did it reach broad agreement?

The document reached broad agreement among the active participants who reviewed and discussed it in the OAuth Working Group.

### 2. Was there controversy about particular points, or were there decisions where the consensus was particularly rough?

There were heated discussions about Section 2.5, “Issuer Verification Key Discovery and Validation,” where earlier draft versions also included a W3C DID-based method. The work on the document was delayed after the authors made changes to the specification without prior discussion in, or consensus from, the working group. These issues were eventually resolved through off-list conversations.

### 3. Has anyone threatened an appeal or otherwise indicated extreme discontent?

Appeals were threatened, and strong dissatisfaction was expressed during the discussions. These concerns have since been resolved.

### 4. For protocol documents, are there existing implementations of the contents of the document? Have a significant number of potential implementers indicated plans to implement? Are any existing implementations reported somewhere, either in the document itself (as RFC 7942 recommends) or elsewhere (where)?

Yes. There are existing implementations and clear evidence of implementation interest.

Implementation status is not described in a dedicated RFC 7942 section in the draft itself, but it has been reported on the OAuth WG mailing list:

- Takahiko Kawasaki reported that the open-source Java SD-JWT library can generate VCs compliant with the SD-JWT VC specification, and that Authlete can issue compliant VCs using OID4VCI:
- Brian Campbell reported that SD-JWT VC was included in the February 2026 EU draft implementing acts for the European Digital Identity Wallet, which is not itself an implementation but is strong ecosystem evidence:
- Oliver Terbu reported additional open-source implementations, including EUDI wallet libraries, walt.id support, and an OpenWallet Foundation Labs .NET implementation:  and

Representative implementation links mentioned in those threads are:

-
-
-
-
-
-
-

## Additional Reviews

### 5. Do the contents of this document closely interact with technologies in other IETF working groups or external organizations, and would it therefore benefit from their review? Have those reviews occurred? If yes, describe which reviews took place.

The document is primarily in the OAuth space and has received review from people with the relevant expertise in the OAuth Working Group. It also has ecosystem relevance to related work in the OpenID Foundation and to the European Digital Identity Wallet ecosystem, but those groups have closely followed the work and some of the authors/working group members are active in the OpenID Foundation and in the discussions related to the Wallet ecosystem.


### 6. Describe how the document meets any required formal expert review criteria, such as the MIB Doctor, YANG Doctor, media type, and URI type reviews.

The document does not contain a MIB module or a YANG module.

The document does define:

- an entry for the JSON Web Token Claims registry
- a media type registration for `application/dc+sd-jwt`, and
- a well-known URI registration for `jwt-vc-issuer`.

The registration templates are present in the IANA considerations section and appear complete and consistent with the body of the draft.

### 7. If the document contains a YANG module, has the final version of the module been checked with any of the recommended validation tools for syntax and formatting validation? If there are any resulting errors or warnings, what is the justification for not fixing them at this time? Does the YANG module comply with the Network Management Datastore Architecture (NMDA) as specified in RFC 8342?

Not applicable. The document does not contain a YANG module.


### 8. Describe reviews and automated checks performed to validate sections of the final version of the document written in a formal language, such as XML code, BNF rules, MIB definitions, CBOR's CDDL, etc.

The document does not contain sections in a formal language such as YANG, MIB, ABNF, CDDL, or XML schema that would require specialized automated validation.

The document does, however, contain many examples and those examples are in JSON. Most of the examples are valid expect for the examples in Figure 15, which is only a JSON snippet, and in Figure 22 where  the portrait claim value is a JSON string splitting across lines due to the 72 character line limit.

## Document Shepherd Checks

### 9. Based on the shepherd's review of the document, is it their opinion that this document is needed, clearly written, complete, correctly designed, and ready to be handed off to the responsible Area Director?

Yes.

The shepherd believes the document is needed, sufficiently clear, technically mature, and ready to be handed off. The shepherd reviewed the document in detail and also sent a shepherd review to the working group during April 2026. That review focused mainly on clarity, terminology consistency, structure, and section naming; the document has improved in those areas.

### 10. Several IETF Areas have assembled lists of common issues that their reviewers encounter. For which areas have such issues been identified and addressed? For which does this still need to happen in subsequent reviews?

The document is mainly a security area document. The shepherd specifically looked at common security issues, including:

- clear distinction between inherited SD-JWT processing and SD-JWT-VC-specific profiling,
- trust-model clarity for issuer key discovery and validation,
- integrity and retrieval of externally referenced metadata,
- SSRF-related risks from dereferencing external resources,
- privacy considerations, and
- consistency of terminology and examples.

Those issues have been addressed to a reasonable degree in the current document. No specific remaining area-review gap is known to the shepherd.

### 11. What type of RFC publication is being requested on the IETF stream (Best Current Practice, Proposed Standard, Internet Standard, Informational, Experimental or Historic)? Why is this the proper type of RFC? Do all Datatracker state attributes correctly reflect this intent?

The requested publication type is **Proposed Standard** on the IETF stream.

That is the proper type because the document defines interoperable data formats, metadata formats, validation and processing rules, and IANA registrations intended for deployment and interoperation.


### 12. Have reasonable efforts been made to remind all authors of the intellectual property rights (IPR) disclosure obligations described in BCP 79? To the best of your knowledge, have all required disclosures been filed? If not, explain why. If yes, summarize any relevant discussion, including links to publicly-available messages when applicable.

Yes. Reasonable efforts were made. The shepherd explicitly asked the authors on the OAuth WG mailing list to confirm compliance with the BCP 78 / BCP 79 disclosure obligations and to indicate whether they were aware of any IPR associated with the document.

All authors responsed and are not aware of any IPR associated with this document.

Links:
- Brian Campbell:
- Oliver Terbu:
- Daniel Fett:


### 13. Has each author, editor, and contributor shown their willingness to be listed as such? If the total number of authors and editors on the front page is greater than five, please provide a justification.

Yes. All listed authors confirmed their willingness to be listed.

- Brian Campbell:
- Oliver Terbu:
- Daniel Fett:


### 14. Document any remaining I-D nits in this document. Simply running the idnits tool is not enough; please review the "Content Guidelines" on authors.ietf.org. (Also note that the current idnits tool generates some incorrect warnings; a rewrite is underway.)

No remaining blocking I-D nits are known to the shepherd.

The shepherd manually reviewed the front matter, boilerplate, references structure, and IANA considerations for obvious issues. The document still contains lines that are too long. The shepherd expects those to be fixed in AUTH48. RFC 5785 could also be replaced by RFC 8615.

### 15. Should any informative references be normative or vice-versa? See the IESG Statement on Normative and Informative References.

The current normative/informative split appears correct. The shepherd is not aware of any reference that clearly belongs in the opposite category.

### 16. List any normative references that are not freely available to anyone. Did the community have sufficient access to review any such normative references?

None. The normative references are to publicly available RFCs and freely available W3C specifications.

### 17. Are there any normative downward references (see RFC 3967 and BCP 97) that are not already listed in the DOWNREF registry? If so, list them.

No normative downward references were identified.

### 18. Are there normative references to documents that are not ready to be submitted to the IESG for publication or are otherwise in an unclear state? If so, what is the plan for their completion?

No. The normative references are to published and stable specifications.

### 19. Will publication of this document change the status of any existing RFCs? If so, does the Datatracker metadata correctly reflect this and are those RFCs listed on the title page, in the abstract, and discussed in the introduction? If not, explain why and point to the part of the document where the relationship of this document to these other RFCs is discussed.

No. Publication of this document will not change the status of any existing RFCs.

### 20. Describe the document shepherd's review of the IANA considerations section, especially with regard to its consistency with the body of the document. Confirm that all aspects of the document requiring IANA assignments are associated with the appropriate reservations in IANA registries. Confirm that any referenced IANA registries have been clearly identified. Confirm that each newly created IANA registry specifies its initial contents, allocations procedures, and a reasonable name (see RFC 8126).

The shepherd reviewed the IANA considerations section and found it consistent with the body of the document.

These requests correspond to mechanisms defined in the document body, and the referenced IANA registries are clearly identified.

The document does not create a new IANA registry.

### 21. List any new IANA registries that require Designated Expert Review for future allocations. Are the instructions to the Designated Expert clear? Please include suggestions of designated experts, if appropriate.

None. The document does not create any new IANA registries.

## Reference Links

- Datatracker page: