TinyCloud's passkey/TEE-backed identity provider — it produces and custodies owner keys, designates a primary key per account, and brokers sign-in, scoped delegation, and device approval for apps, CLIs, and agents.

OpenKey

OpenKey is the identity layer of TinyCloud: a passkey / TEE-backed provider that produces and custodies the owner keys every capability chain roots in, and brokers SIWE sign-in and delegation issuance for apps, the CLI, and agents. It is how a user gets a self-custodiable DID without managing raw private keys themselves. It runs in production at openkey.so (web) and api.openkey.so (API); the browser SDK is @openkey/sdk 0.10.2.

Role

In the locked layer model OpenKey sits in Layer 1 alongside the base protocol and the policy engine — it is identity infrastructure, not an app. It supplies the root DID that chain validation terminates at, and it is the consent surface where an owner sees and approves every capability an app, CLI profile, or agent asks for.

Keys and the primary key

An OpenKey account holds one or more keys (packages/db/prisma/schema.prisma): MANAGED keys are generated and sealed in OpenKey's TEE; EXTERNAL keys are linked wallets that sign through the user's own provider. Each key is a separate owner — its own did:pkh, its own spaces, its own data.

One active managed key per account is the primary key (services/primary-key.ts). OpenKey preselects it on /delegate approvals when no owner is named, every returned delegation carries a primary flag, and OAuth tinycloud:manage-key signing uses it. The owner changes it from the dashboard (POST /api/keys/:keyId/primary, from a signed-in OpenKey session; external and archived keys are ineligible). Changing the primary key moves no data between owners.

Mechanics

Surface	Purpose
`/api/keys/*`	Key listing, `sign`, `sign-typed-data`, TEE `quote` (attestation), archive, primary selection
`/api/delegate` (`/prepare`, `/complete`, `/sign`, `/host`)	Turn a manifest or explicit permission request into a signed delegation after the owner consents; lifetime capped at 30 days
`/api/device-authorizations`	device-authorization — approve a CLI or agent session on another device
`/api/delegation-codes`	Short-lived public handoff of a signed delegation by an 8-character code

Consent narrowing. The owner may uncheck capabilities on the consent page; the signed SIWE that comes back can therefore be narrower than the prepared one. /complete verifies the signature against the address in the signed SIWE and reports expiry from it, and clients complete with the returned signedMessage.

Link policy. An ordinary /delegate link may only return to a loopback callback or an exact registered HTTPS callback (today the hosted MCP connector), and never follows redirects. Unrecognized nodes need an explicit acknowledgment.

Raw encryption grants. A decrypt grant on an encryption network (urn:tinycloud:encryption:<ownerDid>:<name>) is signed as a top-level ReCap resource rather than nested under a space, and only for networks the signing owner controls.

SDK. @openkey/sdk provides connect(), message and typed-data signing, OpenKeyProvider (a raw EIP-1193 provider the TinyCloud web SDK signs through), authorizeTinyCloud(), and correlated sign-out: signOut() resolves { requestId, revoked }, where revoked is true only when OpenKey confirmed the old session no longer works. Since 0.10.2 the embedding page never receives an OpenKey session token; bearer session tokens are refused outside OpenKey origins and widgets require an exact origin.

Relationships

Produces the owner DIDs that root capabilities / cacao-chain-validation; brokers SIWE, delegation, and device-authorization; issues the session grants session-keys hold; consent surface for the CLI and agents; a Layer-1 peer of the policy-engine (see architecture-layers).

Status & drift

shipped. Core key custody, /delegate, and sign-out have been in production since mid-2026; device authorization shipped for Share publishing in Aug 2026 and gained bounded KV scopes on Oct 2; the /delegate link policy, raw encryption grants, primary-key selection, delegation codes, and widget token hardening landed on OpenKey main between Oct 2 and Oct 5, 2026. The CLI's use of delegation codes and its primary-key warning ship in @tinycloud/cli 1.1.0 beta, not 1.0.0. For passkey/WebAuthn internals and TEE attestation detail, defer to OpenKey's own documentation.

Sources

openkey (main, Oct 5, 2026): apps/api/src/routes/keys.ts (keys, primary selection), apps/api/src/services/primary-key.ts, apps/api/src/routes/delegate.ts (expiry cap, /complete binding), apps/api/src/routes/device-authorization.ts, apps/api/src/routes/delegation-codes.ts, apps/web/src/lib/delegate-link-policy.ts, packages/sdk/src/index.ts (OpenKeyProvider, signOut), packages/db/prisma/schema.prisma (key types)