What is peercred?

The peercred repository provides a small piece of plumbing for programs that talk to each other over a local network connection. Its purpose is to let one program confirm the identity of the program on the other end of a connection, so the first program can make decisions about access or logging based on who it's talking to rather than just where the request came from. At a high level, when two programs on the same machine communicate over a network socket, the operating system knows which process initiated the connection and which user or group it belongs to. This library lets the receiving program ask the operating system for that information. It works with standard Go networking tools and pulls identity details directly from the OS rather than relying on passwords, tokens, or other application-level authentication. Someone building a local service or agent might use this when they want, say, a monitoring tool to accept commands only from processes running under a specific system user, or a background daemon to restrict access to a particular application. Instead of requiring every caller to present a shared secret or API key, the daemon simply checks the OS-level identity of whoever connected. This is useful in environments where programs already trust the underlying machine but still need to enforce boundaries between services. The project is written in Go and appears to be a focused, single-purpose utility rather than a full-featured framework. Beyond the title and basic structure, the README doesn't go into detail about specific configuration options, supported platforms, or installation steps, so anyone evaluating it would likely need to read the code to understand exactly how to integrate it.