Identifiers
After completing the onboarding process, your next step is to create your first identifier. As we touched on, you can create both Individual and Group identifiers, but for now we’ll focus on Individual.
If you’d like to use this identifier to connect to a Cardano dApp using the Cardano Connect feature, you must use an Individual identifier at this time. Group identifier integration with dApps will be coming in the future.
Creation
Begin identifier creation
Navigate to the Identifiers tab (bottom-left) and press the Add an identifier button.
You can alternatively press the plus button in the top right corner of the page.
Enter details
Choose a name that helps you remember the identifier’s purpose and select a theme. Ensure you keep Individual selected as the identifier type.
Complete
After creating the identifier, it will appear in the deck of identifiers. At first, it will be pending, but it should complete quite quickly. For those interested in KERI as a protocol, it will be pending until fully “witnessed”.
You can now click on the card to access all the details of the identifier. From here, you can choose to update the name for your identifier from the details screen, or share your identifier to connect to other wallets and services.
Key rotation
Keys can be actively rotated for identifiers within the identifier details section. This helps keep your identifier secure in case your signing keys have been compromised. In the future, we aim to have advanced notification mechanisms to prompt when you should rotate, or even automatically do it for you.
For now, you cannot rotate keys for a group identifier, but it’s on the near-term roadmap.
Deletion
If you no longer require an identifier, you can choose to delete it. Recovery at this point is still technically possible, but it wouldn’t be straight-forward and is not supported with our wallet currently. Please ensure you only delete identifiers that you will never need again!
Deleting your identifier will delete any pending notifications related to that identifier. It won’t delete any credentials, but you won’t be able to present those credentials anymore.
In KERI, you can “abandon” an identifier by rotating to empty keys but we have not implemented this yet. If implemented, deletion would mean your identifier is not recoverable, but also means that attackers can’t impersonate you using your old, deleted identifiers.