Glossary
First-Use Trust
Trust on first use accepts a credential's claimed identity the first time a system encounters it — there's no independent, trusted source to verify the claim against at that initial moment — and then holds the credential to that same identity for every use after that. If the identity presented the first time was already an impostor's, the system has trusted the wrong party from that point forward without ever having a genuine opportunity to catch the mistake.
This pattern is a deliberate, pragmatic tradeoff rather than a design flaw: it accepts a real, if generally small, risk at the single moment of first contact in exchange for not requiring an independent verification infrastructure for every single new device or credential a system will ever encounter. It's the right choice specifically when that first-contact risk is genuinely low and building out full independent verification would cost far more than the risk being accepted actually justifies.