Question about identity and authentication

#1

Hello,

I’m trying to understand the concept of identity and, more generally, the authentication system.

After having installed locally a Testnet 3bot last week, I tried today to install another instance on another of my computers but this time on Mainnet. When it asked me an identity, I replied with the identity that corresponds to the one of my 3bot connect app. But when I then put the associated email, the bot replies that “This email is currently associated with another identity”.

It seems that we can have only one identity associated with a 3bot connect app. So I don’t really understand how the identity concept works. What is an identity? Why can I have only one on my phone? Why can’t I use this identity for installing a 3bot on Testnet and one on Mainnet? Also in the already installed testnet 3bot , I have in the setting area the possibility to include more than one identity and several admins also. What is the difference between an admin and an identity?

I would suggest to include in the doc an explanation of the global auth structure (the links between the user, the identity concept, the admin concept, the 3bot connect app, the 3bot and eventually the different grids) would be useful.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Kind regards

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#2

Hi @JeromeUlrich, let me try to clarify things a bit:

As of today there are 2 kind of identity concepts:

  • One for the 3Bot connect app.
  • One to interact with the Grid

You are allowed to have only one 3Bot connect identity on your phone. The goal is for you to have exactly one ID in the system: 1 human = 1 ID.

An identity on the grid is only used to interact with the Explorer API to reserve capacity and deploy workloads. There you can generate as much identities as you want. You just need to use a different name-email combination for each.

The concept of “admin” in the 3Bot is a bit different. It allows you to give admin rights on this 3Bot to another person. This mean this person will be able to login to your 3Bot and use any explorer identity that is loaded in the 3Bot. This is useful if you want for example to deploy a 3Bot for an organization and multiple persons need to be able to use/manage it.

This procedure is indeed a bit convoluted, as it has grown organically, we are in the process of unifying it all so that it will get simpler and more natural. We are also in the middle of researches around decentralized identity. Having identity fully in control of the user without us being involved is where we want to go.

Here is a link for documentation around 3Bot settings and identity:

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