---
id: "kerione-where-trust-bottoms-out"
type: "paper"
type_label: "Papers and paper collections"
title: "Where Trust Bottoms Out: X.509, Certificate Transparency, and KERI's DPKI Architecture"
maintainer: "Daniel Hardman"
authors:
  - "Daniel Hardman"
date: null
year: null
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: "active"
status_meaning: "changed within the last six months, or a live service"
access: "public"
access_meaning: "anyone with the link"
topics:
  - "comparisons"
  - "theory"
  - "infrastructure"
roles:
  - "security-architect"
  - "infrastructure-operator"
  - "communications"
  - "researcher"
source_url: "https://dhh1128.github.io/papers/wtbo.html"
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-where-trust-bottoms-out/"
kskb_app_url: "https://kskb.dev/#item/kerione-where-trust-bottoms-out"
kskb_record_url: "https://kskb.dev/data/kskb/resources/kerione-where-trust-bottoms-out"
kskb_markdown_url: "https://kskb.dev/export/cards/kerione-where-trust-bottoms-out.md"
---

# Where Trust Bottoms Out: X.509, Certificate Transparency, and KERI's DPKI Architecture

A paper by Daniel Hardman comparing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) with Certificate Transparency (CT) and the Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI) as a decentralized PKI. It sets out what CT and KERI share, where their roots of trust differ, KERI's own tradeoffs, and how each would handle the transition to post-quantum cryptography. For practitioners who know X.509 and want to place KERI against it.

Labels: reading level Practitioner; evidence informative (an author's paper, deck, tutorial or post explaining the suite).
Source: https://dhh1128.github.io/papers/wtbo.html (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/).