# Introduction

Highflame's Agent Identity infrastructure is based on [**ZeroID**](https://github.com/highflame-ai/zeroid) which is our open-source identity infrastructure for autonomous agents. It gives each agent, service, MCP server, or application a stable identity, issues short-lived credentials, preserves delegation chains, and lets downstream systems verify who is acting and on whose authority.

For developers, the key idea is simple: stop treating agents like anonymous service accounts. Register them as first-class identities, issue scoped tokens, and preserve delegation across orchestrators and sub-agents.

#### What You Can Build With ZeroID

* **Autonomous agents** that authenticate as themselves with short-lived credentials instead of long-lived shared secrets.
* **Multi-agent systems** where orchestrators delegate only a subset of their scope to sub-agents.
* **Identity-aware APIs** that verify ZeroID JWTs and make authorization decisions from claims like `sub`, `act.sub`, `delegation_depth`, `trust_level`, and `scopes`.
* **Operational controls** such as revocation, credential policies, and real-time shutdown via Continuous Access Evaluation (CAE) signals.

#### Public and Admin Surfaces

ZeroID exposes two logical API surfaces:

* **Public endpoints** for token issuance, introspection, revocation, health, and discovery.
* **Admin endpoints** for identity registration, agent lifecycle, API keys, policies, signals, attestation, and proof-token workflows.

This separation is important when you design your deployment. Agents call the public surface directly. Platform and control-plane services call the admin surface.

#### When To Reach For ZeroID

Use ZeroID when you need any of the following:

* Per-agent identity instead of shared credentials
* Verifiable delegation between agents
* Scoped tokens that encode operational context
* Real-time revocation and incident response
* A standards-based identity layer for agentic systems

#### What's Next?

* Start with [**Quick Start**](/agent-identity-zeroid/quick-start.md) to run ZeroID locally and register your first agent.
* Read [**Identity Model**](/agent-identity-zeroid/concepts/identity-model.md) before designing your production tenant and identity taxonomy.
* Use [**SDK Overview**](https://github.com/highflame-ai/highflame-docs/blob/main/api-reference/sdk/zeroid/README.md) if you plan to integrate ZeroID from Python or TypeScript first.


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