Abstract

We describe a decentralized identity architecture that gives every participant in a mixed economy of human persons and autonomous software or robotic agents a sybil-distinct individual identifier, separate from proof of personhood, with revocation authority fixed by the identifier's provenance. A verified human holds both proofs; a machine agent holds the identifier only. Every identity is anchored by two artifacts: a permanent, public, write-once root record (an identifier, a public key, and an issuer signature for a machine or a hash commitment for a human) in an archival medium such as femtosecond-laser-written silica or diamond, and a rotatable operational key held in a secure enclave and never present in the readable medium, transposing the trusted-computing endorsement-key/attestation-key pattern to a deep-time root. A machine identity is assigned by an issuer acting as a certificate authority, revocable through a registry, with issuance published to an append-only transparency log. A human identity is self-generated and witnessed by at least two independent attestors, and has no revocation registry: the institution may witness it but can neither issue nor revoke it. The human root commits to birth date, time and place and kinship-graph position, discloses predicates by zero-knowledge proof, and presents unlinkable per-context pairwise identifiers. A lost key is re-bound to the unchanged root by a threshold of guardians drawn from a verified kinship graph, with no institution in the quorum. After death the root persists as a sealed ancestral node of the family tree. The design is unbuilt.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Download

Share

COinS