notes: research/papers/papers-keri-alphaomega-2025

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research/papers/papers-keri-alphaomega-2025 Key Event Receipt Infrastructure: An Identity System Security Overlay for the Internet, A Trust Spanning Layer for the Internet summary v0.1 — 2026-10-15: drafted by Claude from the PDF slides (text extracted with pdftotext); unread by Mark; marked partner on Mark's word 2026-10-21, paraphrase only partner 613 # Key Event Receipt Infrastructure: An Identity System Security Overlay for the Internet, A Trust Spanning Layer for the Internet **Abstract.** A 57-slide overview deck by Samuel M. Smith, dated 2025-09-03 in its file name, covering Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI) from first principles: the secure attribution problem, trust bases, autonomic identifiers and pre-rotation, duplicity detection, the KERI ecosystem, Authentic Chained Data Containers (ACDC) registries, and the Trust Spanning Protocol (TSP). It lists the specifications and the adoptions the author names, for newcomers and practitioners. ## Summary The deck begins with resources (KERI Foundation, keri.one, the WebOfTrust repositories, the Trust over IP (ToIP) KERI Suite Working Group) and the protocols and specifications: Composable Event Streaming Representation (CESR), KERI, ACDC, TSP, the verifiable Legal Entity Identifier (vLEI), the Verifiable Voice Protocol (VVP) draft, and RAET. An "Adoptions" slide names GLEIF's vLEI, the European Banking Authority's Pillar 3 data hub, DirectTrust, healthKERI, Provenant, the Cardano Foundation's Veridian, and Utah's State Endorsed Digital Identity (SEDI) under S.B. 260. It argues that user-managed private keys, impractical before about 2015, are now practical through mobile devices and hardware security modules, and that identity can be based on them. It frames the work as a first-principles answer to the universal secure attribution problem, and identifies key rotation with recovery from key compromise as the hard problem of private key management, which conventional public key infrastructure (PKI) handles by re-establishing the root of trust at each rotation. The core slides cover identifier theory (ephemeral versus persistent identifiers), administrative, algorithmic and autonomic trust bases, a "security properties teaser" listing the properties KERI aims for, the key event log as a duplicity-evident verifiable data structure, Autonomic Identifiers (AIDs), and pre-rotation with digests of next keys as recovery from a surprise quantum attack. A KERI 2.0 inception event appears in JSON and in annotated CESR. Further slides cover inconsistency versus duplicity, end verifiability, the ecosystem of controllers, witnesses, watchers and judges, and the trust spanning layer. A "Why Should You Care" slide says adoption has been held back by immature tooling, owing to limited resources, and gives the KERI Foundation's mission as mature Apache-2 tooling for "one-click-KERI". Closing slides cover the open-loop issuer-holder-verifier model, Key Event Log (KEL) anchored registries with separable Transaction Event Logs (TELs) for ACDCs, the PAC theorem (privacy, authenticity, confidentiality), and TSP. Backup slides cover delegation, duplicity games, zero-trust architecture, GLEIF's vLEI trust chain and the flaw of PKI. ## Key terms secure attribution, autonomic trust basis, Autonomic Identifier (AID), pre-rotation, duplicity evident, end verifiability, ambient verifiability, trust spanning layer, Key Event Log (KEL), PAC theorem ## Claims and their evidence - Key rotation with key compromise recovery is the hard problem of private key management, and KERI solves it. [informative] - Pre-rotated digests of next keys enable recovery from a surprise quantum attack. [informative] - The KERI Suite has been adopted by GLEIF (vLEI), the EBA Pillar 3 data hub, DirectTrust, healthKERI, Provenant, the Cardano Foundation (Veridian) and the State of Utah (SEDI). [presenter-reported] - Broad adoption has been hindered by immature tooling, primarily from limited resources rather than architecture. [presenter-reported] - One may have any two of privacy, authenticity and confidentiality at the highest level, but not all three. [informative] ## Related KERI specification (ToIP), CESR specification (ToIP), ACDC specification (ToIP), TSP specification (ToIP), Verifiable Voice Protocol Internet-Draft, KERI white paper, Verifiable Trust Bases (2020 deck) ## Provenance Drafted by Claude on 2026-10-15 from the PDF in Smith's Papers repository (presentations/KERI_AlphaOmega.20250903.pdf): slides 1 to 39 read in full as extracted text, the remaining backup slides by heading and first lines. The date is from the file name; the deck names no venue. Not yet read by Mark.

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