---
id: "kerione-a-did-for-everything"
type: "paper"
type_label: "Papers and paper collections"
title: "A DID for Everything"
maintainer: "Shaun Conway; Andrew Hughes; Moses Ma; Jack Poole; Martin Riedel; Samuel M. Smith; Carsten Stöcker"
authors:
  - "Shaun Conway"
  - "Andrew Hughes"
  - "Moses Ma"
  - "Jack Poole"
  - "Martin Riedel"
  - "Samuel M. Smith"
  - "Carsten Stöcker"
date: "2019-01-17"
year: 2019
reading_level: "practitioner"
reading_level_label: "Practitioner"
reading_level_meaning: "architects, product people and adopters who know identity systems"
evidence: "informative"
evidence_meaning: "an author's paper, deck, tutorial or post explaining the suite"
status: "quiet"
status_meaning: "no change in six to eighteen months; still correct"
access: "public"
access_meaning: "anyone with the link"
topics:
  - "theory"
  - "history"
roles:
  - "security-architect"
  - "researcher"
source_url: "https://github.com/SmithSamuelM/Papers/blob/master/whitepapers/A_DID_for_everything.pdf"
source_license: null
source_license_note: null
found_on: "keri-one-resources"
kerisse_credit: false
abstract_license: "CC BY 4.0"
abstract_license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
abstract_attribution: "KSKB, the KERISuite Knowledge Base (https://kskb.dev/)"
last_checked: "2026-10-14"
kskb_url: "https://kskb.dev/cards/kerione-a-did-for-everything/"
kskb_app_url: "https://kskb.dev/#item/kerione-a-did-for-everything"
kskb_record_url: "https://kskb.dev/data/kskb/resources/kerione-a-did-for-everything"
kskb_markdown_url: "https://kskb.dev/export/cards/kerione-a-did-for-everything.md"
---

# A DID for Everything

A Rebooting the Web of Trust VII white paper, subtitled "Attribution, Verification and Provenance for Entities and Data Items", that extends decentralized identifiers from people to any entity, including machines, locations, events and data items. It proposes chaining signed decentralized autonomic data (DAD) items to prove the provenance of a data flow. For architects of identity, Internet of Things and data-provenance systems.

Labels: reading level Practitioner; evidence informative (an author's paper, deck, tutorial or post explaining the suite).
Source: https://github.com/SmithSamuelM/Papers/blob/master/whitepapers/A_DID_for_everything.pdf (license not recorded).
The abstract is KSKB's own text under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/; credit KSKB, the KERISuite Knowledge Base (https://kskb.dev/).