401Standard

401Standard is an open standard that specifies interoperable protocols and data schemas for secure identity, authentication, and authorization in digital interactions. It is designed to enable consistent provisioning of user credentials, verifiable claims, and consent management across services and organizations.

Scope and architecture: The standard defines a modular architecture comprising a core identity schema, credential issuance and verification APIs, a privacy-preserving data exchange layer, and an auditable event log. It supports both federated and decentralized identity models. Data formats include JSON-based representations and compact encodings such as CBOR; it recommends standard claim schemas to improve interoperability.

Key components: Identity representation through claims and verifiable credentials, authentication flows and token exchange mechanisms, credential lifecycle management, consent and data minimization, device attestation, revocation, and robust audit trails. The specification emphasizes privacy-by-design principles and provides guidance for privacy impact assessments and data retention controls.

Conformance and adoption: The standard provides reference implementations in multiple programming languages and a formal conformance test suite. An optional certification program aims to verify interoperability across implementations. Adoption has been reported among several fintechs, cloud providers, and identity services in pilot deployments, with the goal of reducing integration costs and vendor fragmentation.

Governance and history: 401Standard is maintained by the 401Standard Council, which features working groups focused on interoperability, privacy, accessibility, and security. The first public draft appeared in the late 2010s, with successive revisions addressing scalability and cross-domain use cases. Versioning follows a semantic approach to manage changes and backward compatibility.

Reception and critique: Proponents highlight improvements in interoperability, security, and user control over data. Critics point to potential complexity and the overhead of certification and governance, especially for smaller organizations. Related concepts include OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and verifiable credentials.