notes: research/papers/kerione-secure-privacy-authenticity-and-confidentiality-spac

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research/papers/kerione-secure-privacy-authenticity-and-confidentiality-spac Secure Privacy, Authenticity, and Confidentiality (SPAC) summary v0.1 — 2026-10-14: drafted by Claude from the Markdown file (version 0.5.3); unread by Mark; marked partner on Mark's word 2026-10-21, paraphrase only partner 489 # Secure Privacy, Authenticity, and Confidentiality (SPAC) **Abstract.** A white paper, in Markdown on GitHub, that sets out the PAC (privacy, authenticity, confidentiality) trilemma and designs messaging protocols that give the best privacy possible given the strongest authenticity and confidentiality, using KERI autonomic identifiers and a modified ESSR (Encrypt Sender, Sign Receiver) construction. It covers threat models, relationship formation, intermediaries, interaction contexts and a CESR encoding, and is aimed at protocol designers. ## Summary The paper begins with the PAC theorem or trilemma: "One can have any two of the three (privacy, authenticity, confidentiality) at the highest level but not all three." Following the Trust Over IP (ToIP) design goals, it ranks authenticity first, confidentiality second and privacy third, while noting that the order of layered mechanisms inside a protocol need not follow that ranking; the "security overlay spiral" illustrates this. Privacy is framed as control over who took part in a conversation (correlatable non-content metadata), and the paper narrows the goal to "effective privacy": protection against exploitation through correlation rather than against correlation itself. It introduces a three-party exploitation model (first party sender, second party intended receiver, third party anyone else), reviews exploiters and threats such as identity theft and aggregation, and argues that VPN-like trusted intermediaries and contractual protection address different aggregators. The technical part replaces long-term public keys with unbounded-term KERI autonomic identifiers (AIDs), whose current keys are looked up from key event logs (KELs). It pairs end-verifiability (for authenticity) with "end-only-viewability" (for confidentiality), restricts itself to widely available libsodium primitives ("dumb crypto"), and builds on ESSR (Encrypt Sender's key, Sign Receiver's key) to protect against key compromise impersonation, with sourceless and destinationless variants. Later sections define relationships, syntax, out-of-band setup, direct and wrapped protocols, shared and non-shared intermediaries, interaction context identifiers, sustainable privacy, appendices on denial of service, and a CESR (Composable Event Streaming Representation) implementation. ## Key terms PAC trilemma, effective privacy, exploitably correlatable identifiers, three-party exploitation model, unbounded-term AID, end-verifiability, end-only-viewability, ESSR, intermediary, interaction context ## Claims and their evidence - One can have any two of privacy, authenticity and confidentiality at the highest level but not all three (PAC Trilemma). [informative] - ESSR provides both strong authenticity and strong confidentiality by binding the sender's key inside the ciphertext and the receiver's key in the signed plaintext (Modified ESSR). [informative] - Using an unbounded-term AID with a KEL makes abandoned long-term keys detectable to relying parties. [informative] - Protection against exploitation via correlation is practical, while protection against correlation alone is largely impractical (Effective Privacy). [informative] ## Related SPAC Presentation; Sustainable Privacy; KERI White Paper; the ToIP Trust Spanning Protocol (TSP), which the Hitchhiker's Guide Part 3 says SPAC laid the foundation for. ## Provenance Drafted by Claude on 2026-10-14 from the Markdown file (version 0.5.3), read through the heading list and the sections on the PAC trilemma, effective privacy, unbounded-term AIDs, end-verifiability, dumb crypto and modified ESSR. Not yet read by Mark.

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