Identity and admission

Identity in Witbitz is not "there is an account in our database." A Space is self-authenticated: its link carries the public material needed to verify who belongs, and members hold the corresponding private credentials.

This page is the short reader path. The canonical deep dive remains The Verified Room.

Base membership: hold the room key

Every Space has a room key mk. The client mints it and stores only a commitment on the server:

commit(mk) = base64url(sha256(mk))

When a member acts, the render checks that the presented key matches the stored commitment. A right key proves the caller holds the Space link. A wrong key opens nothing.

This proves "a member is present." It does not by itself prove which member.

Per-member identity: signed entries

To attribute entries to a specific person, each member can hold a signing key. The room's public invite key verifies the member grant, and the member's public signing key verifies the entry.

The signed core is conceptually:

{
  "room": "sp-example",
  "author": "ada@example.com",
  "ts": 1785350400000,
  "kind": "text",
  "id": "c:...",
  "text": "I approve this."
}

Because the author is inside the signed core, a rename or forged attribution fails verification.

Admission families

Witbitz inherits the credential model from Kibitz and carries it to async Spaces.

Gated Spaces

On an email-gated Space, the link alone is not enough. Reads and writes both require an allow-listed sign-in. That is why the verification page starts with token-less poll and turn requests that return 403.

The allow-list itself lives in the sealed config, so the platform does not read the membership list at rest.

Run the check: Verify it yourself

Who sets admission

There are two layers:

The owner rule is the enterprise path: an organization can require its own identity provider and tiered capabilities without giving itself access to room content at rest.

Read: Owner-governed rooms

Live vs designed

For the complete status table, see The Verified Room.

Code map

Machine-readable source: identity-and-admission.md · every doc in one fetch: llms-full.txt (HTML) · ← verify · member-lifecycle →