Foundations
Start here if identity is new to you: what an identity is, how people prove who they are, the terminal and web skills the labs use, and the keys, signatures, certificates and token formats that make digital trust possible.
Identity fundamentals
The whole identity landscape through one familiar example, from creating an account to letting another application act for you.
- What is Identity?Follow an account through a name change and see how a service distinguishes the person, the record, and the claims it holds.
- Establishing an identityHelp Mia establish an account, then ask what her chosen name, verified email, and other sources actually tell the service.
- Proving control of an accountFollow Ava back to her account and examine the evidence a service accepts before it lets her sign in.
- Deciding what someone can doFollow a request to a shared album and see how permissions become a decision the server must enforce.
- Clients, servers, and addressesOpen an album with Ava, take its address apart, and follow how the browser finds and connects to the service.
- How applications communicateRead the messages behind Ava's clicks, from an album request to the redirect that takes her to sign-in.
- Staying signed inFollow Ava from one page to the next without another password prompt, then see what must happen when her session ends.
- Trust across systemsFollow Ava's sign-in from one service to another and examine the evidence each participant must trust.
- Keys, encryption, and signaturesTake a sign-in message apart and see how keys, signatures, encryption, hashing, and encoding each contribute something different.
- Protecting credentials and messagesFollow passwords, cookies, and tokens through their lives and see what protects them before a service accepts them.
- Giving another application limited accessHelp a printing application read Ava's photos without collecting her password, then follow how that access is limited.
- History of SSOFollow the problems that shaped shared-computer accounts, network tickets, web sign-in, federation, and passkeys.