Managing Participants and Permissions in a Stage

Stages is still an experimental feature being rolled out gradually. Check your Cloud Drive for the "Stages" option.

CipherDrive Stages uses participant-level permissions so that inviting someone does not automatically give that person unrestricted control of the canvas.

The owner chooses Ackaia identities and grants the capabilities each collaborator needs.

Stage access is identity-based

Each authorized participant uses a Stage-ready Ackaia identity.

The Stage key is wrapped individually for authorized identities. This allows CipherDrive to grant or remove Stage access without publishing the raw Stage key to the coordination layer.

Understand the published roles

The public Stages permission model describes three collaboration profiles: Guest, Editor, and Presenter.

Capability	Guest	Editor	Presenter
Draw, text and shapes	No	Allowed	Allowed
Insert Drive files	No	Allowed	Allowed
Move own objects	Allowed	Allowed	Allowed
Move any object	No	Allowed	Allowed
Control shared viewport	No	No	Allowed

Permissions can be more precise than the role name

Owners configure permissions individually. The published specification explicitly treats capabilities such as Move any and Delete any as elevated permissions.

When adding a participant, follow the principle of least privilege: grant only what that person needs for the collaboration.

Choose access based on the work

A practical way to assign permissions is:

Guest: appropriate when a participant mainly needs access to the Stage and control over their own objects without broad editing privileges.
Editor: appropriate when a participant needs to create canvas content, insert Drive files, and manipulate shared objects.
Presenter: appropriate when a participant also needs to control the shared viewport for the room.

These descriptions summarize the published capability matrix and should not replace a review of the actual permissions shown when access is granted.

Remove a participant

When a participant's access is removed:

that identity immediately loses Stage access;
CipherDrive rotates the Stage key;
future Stage changes are protected under the rotated key;
active key envelopes are secured for the remaining authorized members.

This is more than hiding the Stage from a user interface. Membership changes are part of the cryptographic access model.

Review access when the collaboration changes

Review participant access when:

someone leaves the project;
a person's responsibilities change;
elevated edit or presentation permissions are no longer needed;
an identity may be compromised;
the Stage is approaching the end of live collaboration.