Cryptography
BBS+ signatures
Also known as: BBS signatures
A pairing-based signature scheme that supports selective disclosure and unlinkable presentations — popular in privacy-first VC deployments.
BBS+ (Boneh-Boyen-Shacham, plus extensions) is a signature scheme that supports two properties classical signatures don't: selective disclosure (the holder can reveal only some signed claims, cryptographically proving the rest exist without revealing them) and unlinkability (two presentations from the same credential can't be linked to each other).
These properties make BBS+ attractive for high-privacy credential use cases — medical records, identity attestations, regulatory disclosures. The EU's EUDI Wallet and many SSI-focused platforms lean on BBS+ for selective disclosure.
LearnCoin uses MerkleProof2019 (ECDSA + Merkle path) rather than BBS+ today. BBS+ isn't the right tool for our core workflow — an academic or professional credential is typically presented whole, not selectively — and the BBS+ library ecosystem is less mature than JWS/ECDSA. For use cases that need selective disclosure (an eventual "prove you have a credential without revealing the subject details" feature), SD-JWT is the likelier implementation path.
Related terms