---
id: "kerione-why-anchored-signatures"
type: "paper"
type_label: "Papers and paper collections"
title: "Why Anchored Signatures?"
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: "quiet"
status_meaning: "no change in six to eighteen months; still correct"
access: "public"
access_meaning: "anyone with the link"
topics:
  - "theory"
  - "cryptography"
roles:
  - "developer"
  - "security-architect"
  - "researcher"
source_url: "https://dhh1128.github.io/papers/was.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-why-anchored-signatures/"
kskb_app_url: "https://kskb.dev/#item/kerione-why-anchored-signatures"
kskb_record_url: "https://kskb.dev/data/kskb/resources/kerione-why-anchored-signatures"
kskb_markdown_url: "https://kskb.dev/export/cards/kerione-why-anchored-signatures.md"
---

# Why Anchored Signatures?

A short paper by Daniel Hardman explaining why a bare digital signature is weak evidence once a key may be stolen or rotated, and how anchoring each signing event in a tamper-evident record of key state closes the window for backdated forgeries. It uses KERI key event logs and transaction event logs as the worked solution. For practitioners designing evidence that must survive key rotation.

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