wellknown.id Self-issued identity · Identité auto-émise

Uses · Acting on behalf

Act on someone’s behalf, without their password.

Sometimes you need to act for someone else: a parent’s energy account, a colleague’s calendar. They grant you a signed, limited, revocable permission, and sites can see exactly who is acting for whom. Most of this is a plan, not something that works yet.

How it would work All the uses

How it would work

A grant, not a shared password.

  • A signed permission from one key to another: what you may do, for how long, and on which sites.
  • Sites see both sides. They can tell that you are acting for your parent, and not mistake you for them.
  • They can take it back whenever they like, and the grant is in both your records.

Already here, in part

Secrets, lent with a say each time.

kivi already keeps API keys, SSH keys and signing keys behind your phone’s lock, and your other devices can ask for one over a bond: the phone asks you each time. You can share one with someone you know too, with every device of theirs: lent, kept by you and asked for each time, so you can stop answering; or given, a copy of their own, which you can ask them to forget, though they could have copied it.

Lending one to a service on terms it signs (which models, what spending cap, until when), with a record you both keep, is planned.

Two related plans are different things. Friends who help you back in if you lose every device can’t act for you: Friends hold the spare keys. And secrets you choose could pass to someone you name if something happens to you, without your identity: If something happens to you.

What to know

Where it stands.

  • Built: secrets behind your phone’s lock, kept on your own devices over bonds, and lent or given to someone you know, to every device of theirs.
  • Built, in the preview: signed permissions from one person to another, for one site, that the site checks every time they’re used, so taking one back takes effect at once. It’s in kivi for the people trying the preview with us; kivi in the app stores won’t offer it until a legal review, since a permission like this isn’t a lasting power of attorney. For now a permission is given from kivi on a phone, not kivi on the web.
  • Not built: sites that recognise them yet, and terms for services.

wellknown.id is in development. This page says what works now, and what is only planned.