---
id: "kerione-keri-white-paper"
type: "paper"
type_label: "Papers and paper collections"
title: "Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI) Design"
maintainer: "Samuel M. Smith, Ph.D."
authors:
  - "Samuel M. Smith, Ph.D."
date: "2025-09-14"
year: 2025
reading_level: "implementer"
reading_level_label: "Implementer"
reading_level_meaning: "developers working in or against the code"
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"
  - "start-here"
  - "cryptography"
  - "infrastructure"
roles:
  - "developer"
  - "security-architect"
  - "infrastructure-operator"
  - "researcher"
source_url: "https://github.com/SmithSamuelM/Papers/blob/master/whitepapers/KERI_WP_2.x.web.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-keri-white-paper/"
kskb_app_url: "https://kskb.dev/#item/kerione-keri-white-paper"
kskb_record_url: "https://kskb.dev/data/kskb/resources/kerione-keri-white-paper"
kskb_markdown_url: "https://kskb.dev/export/cards/kerione-keri-white-paper.md"
---

# Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI) Design

The founding white paper for KERI (Key Event Receipt Infrastructure), now at version 2.63, presenting self-certifying autonomic identifiers, key pre-rotation, key event logs and witnessed receipts as a decentralized key management infrastructure and candidate trust spanning layer for the internet. It covers the theory, event semantics, operational modes, witness agreement, derivation codes and serialization in 142 pages, for readers who want the full design rationale.

Labels: reading level Implementer; evidence informative (an author's paper, deck, tutorial or post explaining the suite).
Source: https://github.com/SmithSamuelM/Papers/blob/master/whitepapers/KERI_WP_2.x.web.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/).