How Portable Profile IDs Work

What a portable profile ID is

A portable profile ID is the stable identifier your app receives for a user who signs in with DeadArk. It represents the user's public, profile-level identity — the thing that is meant to be shared with apps and recognized consistently — and it is what you store to know that two sessions belong to the same person.

The word *portable* is the important part. The same profile identity is recognizable across the different apps a user authenticates into, which is what makes "bring your identity with you" real rather than rhetorical.

Profile layer vs. account layer

DeadArk deliberately separates two things most systems blur together:

• The account is the user's private root — their underlying record, credentials, and recovery. This layer is never exposed to integrating apps.
• The profile is the public identity built on top of the account — the portable identifier and public claims that apps are allowed to see.

Your integration lives entirely at the profile layer. You identify users by their portable profile ID and read public claims; you never see, store, or depend on the private account UUID. This boundary is a feature: it gives you exactly enough to recognize a user and nothing you could leak to harm them.

How to use it in your app

• Key your user records on the portable profile ID. When a user signs in, look up your account record by this identifier; create one if it is their first time.
• Do not key on mutable display data. Names and avatars can change; the profile ID is the stable anchor.
• Treat it as the identity, not a secret. It is an identifier, not a credential — your security comes from the OAuth/PKCE flow, not from hiding the ID.

Why portability matters for your users

Because the profile ID is portable, a user who signs into your app is arriving as *themselves* — the same identity they carry elsewhere — rather than as a brand-new, isolated account. That continuity is good for users (one identity, not fifty) and good for you (a real, verified identity backed by passkey authentication, with no password to manage).

It also respects exit: because identity lives at the portable profile layer rather than being trapped in any one app, users retain ownership of who they are. Your app is a place they use their identity, not a place that owns it.

The short version

A portable profile ID is the stable, public, cross-app identifier you store to recognize a DeadArk user — separate by design from the private account UUID, which integrating apps never see.