Verify Your Passport With Its Chip, Then Prove Your Age Without Showing It

Look at the cover of your passport. If there is a small gold symbol of a rectangle around a circle, it is an ePassport: inside is a contactless chip holding the same details as the photo page, plus a digital signature from the issuing country. Many national ID cards have one too. Border gates read it every day. Your phone can read it as well.

What the chip check proves

Open the passport or ID card in your vault and tap Verify with chip. The chip only opens with the document number, the date of birth and the expiry, which the record already holds, so those must be filled in. Hold the phone to the document, keep still for a few seconds, and the app shows what it proved:

• Signed by the issuing country. The chip's data carries a digital signature that chains to that country's signing authority. The app checks it against the list of country authorities it ships with, so a forged or edited chip fails.
• Genuine chip. Where the chip supports it, it proves it is the original and not a copy of another passport's data. Some older chips do not offer this check, and the app says so instead of pretending.
• Matches this document. The number, date of birth and expiry in your vault agree with the chip. If you edit one afterwards, the proof says so, and you can verify again.

All of it runs on your phone. Verifying is free and you can repeat it whenever you like. It works on iPhone and on Android phones with NFC.

Credentials: show the answer, not the document

A photo of your passport hands over everything at once: name, birth date, number, nationality, face. Most checks need one fact. Once a document is verified, Create credentials gives you two credentials bound to your phone's secure hardware:

To sign them, the values that go into the credentials are sent to Kinship Vault's issuing service along with the record of the chip check. Each credential is valid for a year, and the app offers to renew it in its last 30 days. Creating credentials is part of Vault Pro.

Showing a credential

• On a website, on the same phone. In Safari on iOS 26 or later, or Chrome on Android 14 or later, a site that asks for an ID can ask Kinship Vault directly. You see the request and approve it with Face ID, Touch ID or your fingerprint.
• On another screen. When a site or a counter shows a request code, open Credentials → Scan to share and scan it.
• In person, without internet. Credentials → Share nearby sends the answer over Bluetooth to a phone or reader next to you, on iPhone and on Android 12 or later.

Whatever the channel, the answer is signed by your phone for that one request, so a copy of it is useless anywhere else.

Verify someone, free

The other side of the counter matters too. Home → Credentials → Verify someone asks another person for Over 18, Over 21, Name (given name, family name and date of birth) or Full identity. They scan your code, or open a link you send, see exactly what you asked and approve it on their own phone. The code works for 5 minutes and only once, and the answer is checked on yours: the issuer's signature, the credential's dates, that it has not been revoked, and that their phone signed this very request. It is free on every plan.

Besides Kinship Vault credentials, it accepts US mobile driver's licences and EU digital identities whose issuer is on a trust list your device holds. No app? The same check runs in a browser at kinshipvault.app/verify.

Who accepts these credentials

Every website, reader and business decides for itself which credentials it trusts. Today that includes the Kinship Vault app and kinshipvault.app/verify. A business that wants to accept them, at a counter with a standard ISO 18013-5 reader or on its own website, will find our issuer certificate, our signed trust list and the checks to run on Accepting Kinship Vault credentials.