notes: research/papers/kerione-the-duplicity-game

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research/papers/kerione-the-duplicity-game The Duplicity Game: or why you can trust KERI summary v0.1 — 2026-10-14: drafted by Claude from the PDF (72 slides); unread by Mark; marked partner on Mark's word 2026-10-21, paraphrase only partner 480 # The Duplicity Game: or why you can trust KERI **Abstract.** A 72-slide deck presented at Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) Spring 2020 that steps through a game between a controller and validators to show how inconsistency and duplicity in key event logs can or cannot go undetected under local and global consistency guarantees. It closes on key event based provenance and certificate transparency, for readers who want the intuition behind KERI's duplicity detection. ## Summary The deck was given at the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) in spring 2020 (28 to 30 April) and points to the KERI (Key Event Receipt Infrastructure) white paper and implementation notes. It is built as a sequence of animation steps on a few diagrams. It first separates two ideas, using dictionary definitions: inconsistency ("lacking agreement") and duplicity ("acting in two different ways to different people concerning the same matter"). An internally inconsistent key event log is not verifiable, and verification from the self-certifying root of trust protects against it. An externally inconsistent log, where two copies are each verifiable but differ, is duplicitous, and duplicity detection protects against that. The game itself has a controller, Cate, and validators. In the first round Cate promises a consistent pair-wise log, a local consistency guarantee suited to private one-to-one interactions, and the slides ask how Cate could be duplicitous without being caught. In the second, a service or agent controlled by Cate promises a consistent log to anyone, adding high availability. In the third, the service promises the same log to everyone, a global consistency guarantee for public one-to-any interactions; here the slides note that breaking global consistency is a provable liability, that global consistency may only matter once parties need to interact, and introduce ambient duplicity detection. The closing slides describe key event based provenance: KERLs (key event receipt logs) as end-verifiable proofs that anyone may verify, summed up as self-certifying root of trust plus certificate transparency plus KA2CE plus recoverability plus post-quantum security, and background on the certificate transparency problem and solution. ## Key terms inconsistency, duplicity, local consistency guarantee, global consistency guarantee, controller, validator, key event receipt log (KERL), ambient duplicity detection, certificate transparency, end verifiable ## Claims and their evidence - An internally inconsistent log is not verifiable; an externally inconsistent but verifiable log is duplicitous (slide 10). [informative] - Breaking the promise of global consistency is a provable liability (slide 61). [informative] - KERLs are end verifiable, requiring zero trust in intervening infrastructure (slide 69). [informative] - KERI combines a self-certifying root of trust, certificate transparency, KA2CE, recoverability and post-quantum security (slide 69). [informative] ## Related KERI White Paper; KERI White Paper Slide Deck (which repeats the duplicity game slides). ## Provenance Drafted by Claude on 2026-10-14 from the PDF, read through every slide title and the text of slides 1, 10, 24, 43, 61, 69 and 72. Not yet read by Mark.

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