aion-trust

The verifiable résumé — and the trust layer beneath it. A reference implementation of aion-context.

A résumé today is an unverified claim: a PDF anyone can fabricate, that an employer then has to verify by hand — calling past employers, re-running background checks, chasing transcripts, waiting on references. It is slow, expensive, repeated for every application, and routinely defrauded.

aion-trust replaces that with a portable, self-verifying trust artifact. Every line of a résumé becomes a cryptographically signed attestation from the party that can actually vouch for it — an employer, a university, a certification body, an accredited background-check provider — sealed on aion-context and verifiable by anyone, offline, in seconds. The candidate owns the artifact, discloses only what a given employer needs, and reuses it across every application.

Do the work once. Prove it forever.

This is also the seed of something larger. A résumé is just the first surface: the same machinery — signed claims about a person, owned by that person, verifiable without a middleman — is a general identity-and-trust layer. aion-trust starts with hiring because that is where the pain and the savings are most obvious.

The thesis, in one workflow

Issuer  ──signs──▶  Claim  ──held by──▶  Subject's wallet
                                              │
                                       selective disclosure
                                              ▼
Verifier (employer)  ◀──presents──  Presentation (a signed bundle of claims)
        │
        └─ verifies every claim offline against aion-context: issuer signature,
           issuer accreditation, and revocation status — no phone calls, no portals.

A background check becomes a reusable signed claim: run once by an accredited provider, presented to many employers — instead of paid for again on every application. A degree becomes a claim issued by the university (or imported straight from aion-edu). An employment record becomes a claim signed by the former employer. The "new résumé" is the verifiable bundle of these.

Why it saves money

• Background checks, run once: an accredited check becomes a reusable, tamper-proof claim — the candidate stops paying (and waiting) for a fresh check per application.
• Verification at zero marginal cost: employment and education verification drop from hours of HR labor and third-party fees to an instant offline cryptographic check.
• Fraud goes to zero: you cannot present a degree, title, or clean check you were never issued. Bad hires from résumé misrepresentation — among the most expensive hiring errors — are designed out.
• Time-to-hire compresses: onboarding verification that took weeks resolves in seconds.

See docs/VISION.md for the full case and where the savings land.

Status

Phases 0–6 complete. The cryptographic kernel, claims + wallet, accreditation/revocation, field-level selective disclosure (+ anti-replay and predicate proofs), the web surfaces, and W3C VC/VP + did:key interop are all implemented. See docs/ROADMAP.md.

▶ Watch the 3-minute demo — a narrated tour of the issuer, candidate wallet, and employer verifier, the revoke→reject moment, and W3C interop.

Run the web demo

cargo run -p aion-trust-cli -- serve --port 8080
# open http://127.0.0.1:8080  — start with /walkthrough

Three surfaces — issuer console, candidate wallet, employer verifier — and a live walkthrough where a verified claim turns red the instant its issuer revokes it. It is a local single-operator demo (loopback only, in-memory, no persistence); see docs/WEB-SURFACES.md for what that means and why server-side custody is not the production architecture.

The CLI also drives the kernel directly: keygen, issue, present, verify.

Architecture documents

Doc	What it covers
docs/VISION.md	The problem, the world aion-trust enables, the cost case, the identity future
docs/ARCHITECTURE.md	Actors, layering on aion-context, the privacy model, proposed crate layout
docs/DATA-MODEL.md	Claim types, the Trust Profile, the Presentation artifact, schemas
docs/WORKFLOWS.md	End-to-end flows: issue, assemble, present, verify, reuse, revoke
docs/TRUST-MODEL.md	Issuer accreditation, selective disclosure, revocation, threat model
docs/WEB-SURFACES.md	The Phase 5 web demo: surfaces, routes, and the local-demo privacy guardrails
docs/INTEROP.md	W3C VC/VP & did:key export/import, the native-proof model, SD-JWT/BBS+ comparison
docs/COST-MODEL.md	Parameterized savings model with worked examples
docs/COMPLIANCE.md	Mapping to FCRA, EEOC, GDPR/CCPA, NIST 800-63
docs/ROADMAP.md	Phases from kernel to web demo to interop
docs/GLOSSARY.md	Terms of art

Family

aion-trust is part of a family of reference implementations that show aion-context wired into real domains:

• aion-context — the signed, hash-chained provenance kernel everything is built on.
• aion-edu — verifiable education credentials. (Its sealed diplomas import directly into aion-trust as education claims.)
• aion-trust — verifiable human-capital identity: résumés, employment, background checks.