---
id: "hardman-the-shape-of-delegated-authority"
type: "paper"
type_label: "Papers and paper collections"
title: "The Shape of Delegated Authority"
maintainer: "Daniel Hardman"
authors:
  - "Daniel Hardman"
date: "2026-07-11"
year: 2026
reading_level: "practitioner"
reading_level_label: "Practitioner"
reading_level_meaning: "architects, product people and adopters who know identity systems"
evidence: "informative"
evidence_meaning: "an author's paper, deck, tutorial or post explaining the suite"
status: "active"
status_meaning: "changed within the last six months, or a live service"
access: "public"
access_meaning: "anyone with the link"
topics:
  - "theory"
  - "governance"
roles:
  - "security-architect"
  - "standards-policy"
  - "researcher"
source_url: "https://dhh1128.github.io/papers/sda.html"
source_license: null
source_license_note: null
found_on: "hardman-papers"
kerisse_credit: false
abstract_license: "CC BY 4.0"
abstract_license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
abstract_attribution: "KSKB, the KERISuite Knowledge Base (https://kskb.dev/)"
last_checked: "2026-10-15"
kskb_url: "https://kskb.dev/cards/hardman-the-shape-of-delegated-authority/"
kskb_app_url: "https://kskb.dev/#item/hardman-the-shape-of-delegated-authority"
kskb_record_url: "https://kskb.dev/data/kskb/resources/hardman-the-shape-of-delegated-authority"
kskb_markdown_url: "https://kskb.dev/export/cards/hardman-the-shape-of-delegated-authority.md"
---

# The Shape of Delegated Authority

A 2026 paper by Daniel Hardman proposing a model of delegated authority that makes the category of a delegate's act machine-checkable (by telos, effect and kind of state) and lets a stranger verify authority without consulting its issuer. It argues that access control, action taxonomies and decentralized identity each keep only part of what the law of agency long held together, and draws on KERI and ACDC mechanisms for identity and verification. It is for architects of authorization for human and AI agents.

Labels: reading level Practitioner; evidence informative (an author's paper, deck, tutorial or post explaining the suite).
Source: https://dhh1128.github.io/papers/sda.html (license not recorded).
The abstract is KSKB's own text under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/; credit KSKB, the KERISuite Knowledge Base (https://kskb.dev/).