The big picture

You began with "OAuth" as a strange word. Now you can read an identity diagram and name every box. Before the quiz, here is the whole track as one story.

The story you just lived

It began with people. In meet the cast, we met six characters. Maya is the customer, Sam the partner and Priya the employee. Bot A is the RPA bot, Kai the AI agent and Zara the security operator. Then came the first question: what is identity? We split two things. One is who you are (authentication). The other is what you may do (authorization). Proving who you are showed layers of proof. It also covered passkeys and step-up.

Once you are proven, you get a small object the system trusts: a token. Most acronyms are machinery around it (tokens & identity standards). Access must not outlive its reason. So the lifecycle removes Sam's access the same day he quits. One person can have many roles. Personas & the identity fabric says: link personas for risk, separate them for access.

Then security turned modern. Zero trust checks every access on its own. When an account is hacked anyway, when things go wrong taught detection and the kill switch.

Finally, the cast grew beyond people. Companies run many non-human identities, like Bot A. Nobody watches them. AI agents & MCP decide for themselves. They act for Priya, never as her. All of it is regulated work (the rules). See every term in the A–Z glossary.

The threads that tie it together

Where to go next

Pick a box and go deep: Modern Authentication, Authorization models or AI & agents. If AI is new to you, try AI from zero in the Practical AI program. Then test yourself with the cheat sheet & pop quiz.