mDL

Mobile driver's license, abbreviated mDL, is the wallet-issued digital form of the same credential that's been printed on plastic for decades. The standard that defines it is ISO/IEC 18013-5; the issuer is the state DMV (or, outside the US, the equivalent licensing authority); the holder is the resident; the verifier is whoever needs to confirm something about the holder — a merchant enforcing an age rule, an airline checking ID, a regulator running a compliance check.

The thing that makes mDL different from a photo of a driver's license is selective disclosure plus cryptographic signing. The wallet doesn't show the verifier the whole document. It releases only the attributes the verifier requested — for an age check, just the age tier (21+: yes, not the date of birth) — and signs the released attributes with the issuer's key. The verifier validates the signature against the issuer's published key material, and the verification is complete without the verifier ever seeing the rest of the credential.

In the US, mDL adoption is state-by-state. As of 2026, several states have issued production mDLs to residents, and Apple Wallet and Google Wallet both surface mDL flows for those issuers. Coverage continues to expand. The US state compliance hub tracks which states issue mDLs that Stile can verify and which still rely on document scan as the primary path.

For an integrator, the practical consequence of mDL is fewer fields touched, smaller attack surface, and a verification result that's cryptographically attestable to a regulator. The flow is shorter than a document scan (no camera framing, no OCR, no biometric face match), the credential is already authenticated by the device's wallet pin or biometric, and the signed payload is auditable end-to-end. The trade-off is coverage — issuance is still expanding state by state — so production verification flows fall back to document scan when an mDL isn't available.