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

Uses · Legacy

If something happens to you.

You could name someone to receive the secrets you choose, if you die or can’t act. They get those secrets, and never your wellknown.id: they can’t sign in as you. This is a plan, not something that works yet, and its legal side needs review.

How it would work All the uses

How it would work

Chosen secrets, a quorum, and a wait.

  1. You choose what passes on, and to whom. A password manager’s key, the codes to an account, a letter: secrets you keep in kivi, chosen one by one. The person you name needs a wellknown.id wallet, such as kivi.
  2. They’re locked under a key of their own, separate from the one that gets you back in, and split among custodians you choose: perhaps the same people, perhaps not, and perhaps a different number.
  3. You set a period of quiet. Six months, a year: only once none of your devices has shown a sign of you for that long may your custodians begin.
  4. Enough of them must agree, three of five, say, each deciding for themselves that something has happened to you.
  5. Then a wait, and your devices are told. Any sign of you during the wait, from any of your devices, cancels it.
  6. Only then do the shares go to the person you named, encrypted to their wallet alone, and they open the secrets you chose.

What it won’t do

Secrets, never your identity.

  • They can’t become you. Your wellknown.id and your key for every site stay out of it, so no site ever sees someone else signing in as you.
  • Nobody else reads them: not your custodians, who hold only shares, and not wellknown.id, which keeps only a locked copy.
  • It isn’t recovery. Recovery gives your own keyring back to you: Friends hold the spare keys. This gives chosen secrets to someone else.
  • It isn’t acting for you. While you can act, letting someone act for you is a signed permission you can take back: Act on someone’s behalf. A group that acts together, such as a trust, is 3 of 5 must agree.
  • It isn’t a will. Whether passing on a secret this way has any legal effect, and how it sits beside a will, an executor or a lasting power of attorney, is for legal review before it’s offered to anyone.

Still to settle

What isn’t decided.

  • How custodians decide that something has happened to you, with no central register to ask. As built for testing: a period of quiet you set (a year by default, six months at least), then enough of them agreeing, then a window for any sign of you to stop it. Whether someone who has seen a death certificate, a solicitor or a registrar, could be one of them isn’t settled.
  • What they’re told. As built for testing: whose share they hold, and whether the period of quiet has passed; not who else holds one, nor whom you named. The person you named is told only if you choose to tell them.
  • The legal side, in the UK and elsewhere.

What to know

Where it stands.

  • Built, in the preview: all of the above, tested from end to end, in kivi for the people trying the preview with us. kivi in the app stores won’t offer it until the legal review.
  • Built and offered: secrets kept in kivi behind your phone’s lock, and shared with someone else’s device over a bond.

wellknown.id is in development. This page describes a plan, and says what works now.