&gt; Your SSH private key is not your identity<p>Absolutely. It&#x27;s my credential. In a perfect system, we decouple those from identities - but that&#x27;s hard. If you have some ideas about this or know a system that handles this - please share a link.<p>In a less than perfect system, we at least have to try to assure that credentials are self-sufficient and don&#x27;t require a third party to just exist. That leaves us with either keypairs or pre-shared secrets (traditional passwords). Maybe something else but I don&#x27;t know.<p>&gt; In a sane world, it needs to be possible for someone with common sense to revoke and reissue your credential if you lose it<p>Well, yes. However, there is just no advancement at the moment - proposed general approach is just not better or worse in this regard. It&#x27;s the same as if you&#x27;ve lost your password and email in a most traditional identity system out there. If you lose all credentials - your identity&#x27;s lost and you can only talk to each consumer individually and negotiate whenever a recovery&#x27;s (to a new identity) possible. This doesn&#x27;t change.<p>However, in theory, you can set up a system in which your friends or someone you trust may help you to recover or revoke your key. I&#x27;m no crypto expert, but I heard we have fancy things like threshold signatures and secret sharing schemes (where k-out-of-n members quorum is necessary to recover a secret or generate a valid signature), so I believe there are some options for the future how we can improve things - in a ways more flexible and secure than things are now.