Card Verifiable Certificates (CVC) are

digital certificate In cryptography, a public key certificate, also known as a digital certificate or identity certificate, is an electronic document used to prove the validity of a public key. The certificate includes information about the key, information about the ...

s that are designed to be processed by devices with limited computing power such as

smart cards A smart card, chip card, or integrated circuit card (ICC or IC card) is a physical electronic authentication device, used to control access to a resource. It is typically a plastic credit card-sized card with an embedded integrated circuit (IC) c ...

. This is achieved by using simple

type–length–value Within communication protocols, TLV (type-length-value or tag-length-value) is an encoding scheme used for optional informational elements in a certain protocol. A TLV-encoded data stream contains code related to the record type, the record val ...

(TLV) encoding with fixed fields. Fixed fields means that each field in the certificate is of fixed, or maximum, length and each field comes in a well defined order. This makes parsing easy, in contrast to

asn.1 Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) is a standard interface description language for defining data structures that can be serialized and deserialized in a cross-platform way. It is broadly used in telecommunications and computer networking, and ...

parsing which requires more processing and has to keep fields in memory while parsing nested content. CVC is used by the third generation ePassports implementing

Extended Access Control Extended Access Control (EAC) is a set of advanced security features for electronic passports that protects and restricts access to sensitive personal data contained in the RFID chip. In contrast to common personal data (like the bearer's photograp ...

(EAC). There are open source implementations for processing EAC/CVC certificates: *

EJBCA EJBCA (formerly: ''Enterprise JavaBeans Certificate Authority'') is a free software public key infrastructure (PKI) certificate authority software package maintained and sponsored by the Swedish for-profit company PrimeKey Solutions AB, which h ...

* JMRTD

References

Public-key cryptography {{cryptography-stub