---
id: "kerione-the-architecture-of-identity-systems"
type: "article"
type_label: "Articles, press releases and opinion"
title: "The Architecture of Identity Systems"
maintainer: "Phil Windley"
authors:
  - "Phil Windley"
date: "2020-09-28"
year: 2020
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: "quiet"
status_meaning: "no change in six to eighteen months; still correct"
access: "public"
access_meaning: "anyone with the link"
topics:
  - "theory"
  - "comparisons"
roles:
  - "security-architect"
  - "communications"
  - "investor"
  - "researcher"
source_url: "https://www.windley.com/archives/2020/09/the_architecture_of_identity_systems.shtml"
source_license: null
source_license_note: null
found_on: "keri-one-resources"
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: "2026-10-14"
kskb_url: "https://kskb.dev/cards/kerione-the-architecture-of-identity-systems/"
kskb_app_url: "https://kskb.dev/#item/kerione-the-architecture-of-identity-systems"
kskb_record_url: "https://kskb.dev/data/kskb/resources/kerione-the-architecture-of-identity-systems"
kskb_markdown_url: "https://kskb.dev/export/cards/kerione-the-architecture-of-identity-systems.md"
---

# The Architecture of Identity Systems

A blog post by Phil Windley that sorts identity systems into administrative, algorithmic and autonomic architectures and examines how each one's root of trust determines who holds control. It presents KERI as a general-purpose system for autonomic identifiers, bound at inception to a key pair, whose operations are recorded in a key event log. For readers comparing identity architectures.

Labels: reading level Practitioner; evidence informative (an author's paper, deck, tutorial or post explaining the suite).
Source: https://www.windley.com/archives/2020/09/the_architecture_of_identity_systems.shtml (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/).