> Your SSH private key is not your identity Absolutely. It's my credential. In a perfect system, we decouple those from identities - but that's hard. If you ha

> Your SSH private key is not your identity Absolutely. It's my credential. In a perfect system, we decouple those from identities - but that's hard. If you have some ideas about this or know a system that handles this - please share a link. In a less than perfect system, we at least have to try to assure that credentials are self-sufficient and don't require a third party to just exist. That leaves us with either keypairs or pre-shared secrets (traditional passwords). Maybe something else but I don't know. > In a sane world, it needs to be possible for someone with common sense to revoke and reissue your credential if you lose it Well, yes. However, there is just no advancement at the moment - proposed general approach is just not better or worse in this regard. It's the same as if you've lost your password and email in a most traditional identity system out there. If you lose all credentials - your identity's lost and you can only talk to each consumer individually and negotiate whenever a recovery's (to a new identity) possible. This doesn't change. However, in theory, you can set up a system in which your friends or someone you trust may help you to recover or revoke your key. I'm no crypto expert, but I heard we have fancy things like threshold signatures and secret sharing schemes (where k-out-of-n members quorum is necessary to recover a secret or generate a valid signature), so I believe there are some options for the future how we can improve things - in a ways more flexible and secure than things are now.