notes: research/papers/papers-internet-safety-with-keri-percolation-oobi

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research/papers/papers-internet-safety-with-keri-percolation-oobi Internet Safety with KERI: Invasion Percolation Discovery, OOBIs (Out-Of-Band-Introductions), Spanning Trust Layer summary v0.1 — 2026-10-15: drafted by Claude from the PDF slide deck (all 28 slides); unread by Mark; marked partner on Mark's word 2026-10-21, paraphrase only partner 470 # Internet Safety with KERI: Invasion Percolation Discovery, OOBIs (Out-Of-Band-Introductions), Spanning Trust Layer **Abstract.** A 28-slide deck by Samuel M. Smith, marked for an IIW (Internet Identity Workshop) session in 2021, on how KERI (Key Event Receipt Infrastructure) components discover each other. It covers user-permissioned percolated discovery, the OOBI URL forms, the BADA data acceptance policy, and the spanning-layer argument for KERI. For practitioners and implementers. ## Summary The deck starts from percolation theory: information shared pairwise eventually reaches all honest nodes of a spanned network when good information has the stronger "capillary force", here authenticity. Each honest user's graph of the parties it deals with forms a web of trust that anchors discovery. The key idea is need-to-know, just-in-time discovery: an issuer gives the holder what it needs to verify an issuance, and the holder passes that on to a verifier at presentation. Because KERI data is end-verifiable, the path it took does not need to be trusted, so discovery becomes an availability problem rather than a security problem. The deck names this SPED (Speedy Percolated Endpoint Discovery). It then argues for using the existing internet safely: DNS and certificate authorities are out-of-band with respect to KERI security and may be used for introductions but not for authentication. An OOBI is a URL paired with an AID (autonomic identifier), simple enough for a QR code. The deck shows the basic form, query-string variants that label a role, a well-known path variant, verbose and multi-OOBI reply messages, and bare URLs used for self or blind introductions to bootstrap infrastructure. On attack protection it names replay and deletion attacks, mitigated by monotonicity and redundancy, and sets out BADA (Best Available Data Acceptance) rules for accepting updates anchored to or signed under a KEL (key event log) key state. It closes with background slides on endpoint disclosure, DNS and BGP hijacking, the identity system security overlay, and the hourglass and "waist and neck" spanning-layer model. ## Key terms invasion percolation, need-to-know just-in-time discovery, SPED, OOBI, blind OOBI, end-verifiability, BADA policy, replay attack, deletion attack, spanning layer ## Claims and their evidence - With end-verifiable data, any discovery source is as good as any other, so discovery is an availability problem, not a security problem. [informative] - DNS and certificate authorities can be used safely for introductions as long as they are not used for authentication. [informative] - An OOBI may forward to another OOBI safely because the final endpoint is authenticated. [informative] - Replay attacks are mitigated by monotonicity and deletion attacks by redundancy. [informative] ## Related Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI) specification (OOBI and BADA sections); OOBI draft specification; KERI white paper; PAC Theorem deck. ## Provenance Drafted by Claude on 2026-10-15 from the PDF in Smith's Papers repository, all 28 slides read as extracted text. Not yet read by Mark.

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