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24/06/2026 8:51 pm
TL;DR: Decentralized identity replaces centralized identity stores with verifiable credentials, digital wallets, and cryptographic proof, aiming to reduce large-scale breach risk and improve privacy, according to 1Kosmos. The governance shift matters because IAM teams must move from warehousing identity data to verifying claims, not assuming a single authority will remain trustworthy forever.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by 1Kosmos: Key Lessons on decentralized identity and verification models
By the numbers:
- With support for over 150 countries and 99%+ accuracy in detecting spoofing or counterfeit credentials, it verifies users instantly using government-issued IDs, biometrics, and flexible assurance levels.
- Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them.
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
Questions worth separating out
A: Organisations should treat proofing as evidence that a claim is valid and access governance as a separate entitlement decision.
Q: Why does decentralized identity still require strong lifecycle governance?
A: Because portable credentials do not eliminate expiry, revocation, or role change.
Q: What do security teams get wrong about selective disclosure?
A: They often assume selective disclosure is only a privacy feature.
Practitioner guidance
- Separate proofing from entitlement decisions Define a policy boundary between identity verification and access approval so a valid credential does not automatically translate into access rights.
- Instrument proof acceptance events Log which credential was presented, which issuer was trusted, what status check was performed, and why the verifier accepted the proof.
- Test revocation and status dependencies Run failure tests for stale credentials, offline verifiers, and revoked credentials presented from a wallet.
What's in the full article
1Kosmos' full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Step-by-step explanation of holder, issuer, and verifier flows for deployment planning
- Practical examples of selective disclosure and digital wallet verification in real onboarding journeys
- Standards and interoperability context for teams assessing whether decentralized identity is ready for rollout
- Implementation details behind browser and mobile-based identity verification experiences
👉 Read 1Kosmos' analysis of decentralized identity and credential verification →
Decentralized identity and IAM: what changes for verification models?
Explore further
25/06/2026 5:41 am
Decentralized identity is really a control-plane shift, not just a privacy feature. The article correctly emphasises user control, but the deeper change for IAM is that organisations stop acting as long-term custodians of identity records and start acting as verifiers of claims. That shifts assurance, revocation, and evidence collection into a distributed trust model. Practitioners should treat this as a redesign of identity control ownership, not a cosmetic privacy enhancement.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Another finding from 52 NHI Breaches Analysis shows that identity failures often persist because ownership and offboarding never line up cleanly.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How can IAM teams evaluate decentralized identity before production use?
A: They should test issuer trust, revocation status, wallet interoperability, and fallback decisions under failure conditions. If any of those controls are weak, the architecture may still reduce data exposure but will not be reliable enough for high-assurance identity use.
👉 Read our full editorial: Decentralized identity shifts verification from storage to trust
