BOA ID

There are roughly 24,000 BOAs in the Netherlands — public-transport inspectors, parking enforcement, forest rangers, harbor police, and many more. Each one carries a physical badge issued by Justis. Two structural problems sit on top of that badge:

• Fraud-sensitive. A lost or stolen badge can be used by anyone. Citizens have no way of checking whether the holder is a real, currently-accredited BOA.
• Privacy-sensitive. The badge shows the BOA's full name. Hostile citizens use that to track officers down, harass them at home, or target their families.
• Slow & expensive to issue. Printing, shipping, activating and revoking physical badges is a logistical chain that takes days.
• No way to revoke. Once a badge is in the wild, Justis has no real-time mechanism to invalidate it in the eyes of the public.

The Ministry of Justice & Security wanted a digital alternative that eliminated those risks while preserving the trust that the physical badge carries — and preferably, added new capabilities along the way.

The INSIGNE platform replaces the plastic badge with a Verifiable Credential issued by Justis, carried on the BOA's phone, and verifiable by any citizen — without installing anything.

1. Issuance. Justis uses a web portal to issue a digital BOA ID as a Verifiable Credential, signed with Justis' own DID. The BOA receives an email with a reference code and, separately, a PIN. They install the INSIGNE app, enter the PIN, and the credential is stored encrypted on their device — with a seed-phrase recovery flow for device loss.

2. Identification. When the BOA needs to identify themselves, they open the app, choose which attributes to share (badge number, photo, scope of authority) and unlock with biometrics. The app generates a short-lived Verifiable Presentation.

3. Verification. The citizen scans the QR on the BOA's screen with their default phone camera — no app needed. The QR contains an encrypted link to a Ministry-hosted page showing the BOA's selected attributes, authenticity status and current validity. The presentation expires after 15 minutes and is used at most once.

4. Revocation. Justis can revoke a BOA ID from the Issuer Portal. The next verification — online within seconds — reports the credential as invalid.

The whole flow is built on W3C Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials, so the same credential can be used across any compatible verifier and sits wallet-ready for the European Digital Identity Wallet rollout.

Credenco delivered the complete INSIGNE stack for the Justis-RET pilot, from mobile app to Issuer Portal to verification service. Scope:

• INSIGNE mobile app for iOS and Android — credential storage, selective disclosure, biometric unlock, offline safeguards.
• Justis Issuer Portal — web application for issuing, re-issuing and revoking BOA credentials.
• Verification service — public-facing page that renders the Verifiable Presentation for any citizen who scans the QR, plus an authenticated view for fellow enforcement officers.
• HSM-backed key management on the mobile device for the BOA's private keys, plus automatic lockout if the phone stays offline for too long.
• Revocation & audit trail — who issued, who activated, who viewed, and when.
• Privacy-by-design architecture — Verifiable Presentations encrypted at rest, deleted after one view or 15 minutes, and never tied to the verifying citizen's identity.