Uber has integrated Apple’s Verify with Wallet into its cross-app Identity Verification Platform, letting riders and others confirm their identity using a digital ID held in Apple Wallet across eligible use cases on Uber, Uber Eats, and Postmates. In an engineering note, the company describes building the integration as a reusable platform capability rather than a series of one-off integrations, validating the data it receives against the ISO/IEC 18013-5 standard for mobile documents.
The appeal of Verify with Wallet is that it draws on government-backed credentials already on the phone. Mobile wallets can now store mobile documents such as a mobile driver’s license or photo ID, and the Apple API lets an app request specific identity attributes from those credentials, with the issuing authority and Apple unable to see when or where a user shares them. Uber says the method lets a user verify an account in seconds rather than minutes, without locating a physical ID.
The engineering challenge was scoping each request to its purpose. Uber notes that a driver onboarding flow needs different identity data than an age-gated order or a car rental, so its Identity Verification Service enforces per-use-case limits, ensuring any given request only asks for the data elements pre-approved by Apple for that case. A mapping layer translates Uber’s internal identity models into the wallet API’s objects, including a parameter that specifies whether data is used once or stored.
Trust ultimately rests on cryptographic checks. Uber decrypts the wallet payload and runs validations defined by ISO/IEC 18013-5: confirming the data has not been altered since issuance, that the response came from the authorized device, and that the credential’s certificate chains back to a government issuing authority’s root. To keep those checks current, Uber maintains a registry of issuer certificates drawn from sources such as the AAMVA Digital Trust Service, designed to handle the key rotations that jurisdictions periodically perform.
The work fits the broader move of government IDs into phone wallets, as states have added credentials such as Arkansas driver’s licenses and state IDs to Apple Wallet and California’s mobile driver’s license to Samsung Wallet. Uber says it plans to support additional credential types, including photo IDs built to ISO/IEC 23220-2, and to deepen cross-platform support for the wider digital credentials ecosystem.
Sources: Uber
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
