Skip to main content
A verifier is anyone an agent presents a Stamped Mandate to: a merchant, a service, a site, or another agent. A mandate identifier on its own proves nothing, and a mandate can be revoked at any moment after it was signed. So a verifier checks it before acting on it.

​
How an agent presents a mandate

An agent presents a Stamped Mandate to a site as a token issued by Sumvin, in the x-sumvin-pint-token request header:
The token is addressed to the site’s hostname. The site checks it on its own server, offline, against Sumvin’s published keys, and accepts only a token addressed to itself. How to run that check is in the verifier quickstart. An online check for these tokens, which would also catch a mandate revoked since it was signed, is coming soon. A mandate can also be looked up by its identifier, such as sr:us:pint:3f9c2a7e5b1d4c8e9a6f0b2d7e4c1a58. How to run that check is in Check a mandate.

​
What the check answers

​
Stands, not status

A mandate stands only when all of these are true:
  • its status is active;
  • it has not passed its expiry;
  • every larger mandate it was narrowed from is itself still intact.
A mandate can read active while a larger mandate above it has been revoked. It no longer permits anything. Only stands accounts for that.

​
Ceiling

The ceiling is stated the way a person reads it: 12.50, never 1250. If the ceiling can no longer be read back out of the mandate’s scopes, it is reported as missing. Treat a missing ceiling as unverifiable, never as unlimited.

​
States

Only active can permit anything, and none of the last three ever becomes active again.

​
What a verifier never learns

  • Who the person is. No name, email or other contact details.
  • Anything above the mandate it was shown. The narrowing depth is a count, not a list. The larger mandates each permit more than the one presented, so their identifiers are never returned.
Checking a mandate grants nothing and changes nothing. It is a read.

​
Next

Check a mandate

Run the check.

Examples

What a verifier sees for each use case.