Self-Sovereign Tunneling: Using DIDs to Replace Centralized Auth Tokens
IT InstaTunnel Team Published by our engineering team Self-Sovereign Tunneling: Using DIDs to Replace Centralized Auth Tokens Stop trusting third-party providers with your auth tokens. Here’s how Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) and Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) are enabling a new generation of peer-to-peer tunnels — where your identity wallet is the only “login” you’ll ever need. Introduction: The Shift Away from Centralized Tunneling For most of the early 2020s, the developer’s toolkit for local-to-public exposure was dominated by a handful of centralized “tunnel-as-a-service” providers. ngrok, Cloudflare Tunnel, and their contemporaries became household names in developer circles. Convenient, yes. But architecturally flawed in one critical way: the provider became the gatekeeper of your identity. To open a tunnel, you needed an account. To authenticate, you needed a Bearer Token living in a .yml file. If that provider’s database was breached — or if you accidentally committed...