ENGINEERING · OVERVIEW
One person. Different roles in the system.
Principal, account, and identity describe different responsibilities in Zeredi. Keeping them separate helps us reason about access, ownership, and representation without treating them as the same thing.
Principal: who signs in.
The authenticated actor. A principal owns usernames and can be assigned access to accounts. It is the starting point for authentication, not the whole of a person's profile.
Account: what they manage.
The account record brings together account metadata, lifecycle, and ownership relationships. A principal's account assignment connects the signed-in actor to an account; the two records have separate responsibilities.
Identity: what is represented.
Identity describes who or what the information represents. Keeping it separate from sign-in helps make representation, ownership, and access clearer.
How they come together.
During personal signup, Zeredi creates a principal, provisions a personal account and identity records, and assigns that account to the principal. They work together, but remain distinct parts of the system.
Separate concepts. Explicit permissions.
Knowing an account or identity identifier does not establish permission to access it. Access checks still belong at the appropriate API and policy boundaries. These architectural concepts do not grant a third party access to personal information.
This is a conceptual overview, not a public API specification, a complete security description, or an announcement of integration availability. Third-party API integrations will not be open at launch.