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Where Trust Bottoms Out: X.509, Certificate Transparency, and KERI's DPKI Architecture

Practitioner informative

Maintainer: Daniel Hardman · checked 2026-10-14

A paper by Daniel Hardman comparing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) with Certificate Transparency (CT) and the Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI) as a decentralized PKI. It sets out what CT and KERI share, where their roots of trust differ, KERI's own tradeoffs, and how each would handle the transition to post-quantum cryptography. For practitioners who know X.509 and want to place KERI against it.

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