---
id: "papers-keri-overview-2019"
type: "talk"
type_label: "Talks and presentations"
title: "Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI): Model for a Universal DKMI"
maintainer: "Samuel M. Smith"
authors:
  - "Samuel M. Smith"
date: "2019-12"
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status: "superseded"
status_meaning: "replaced by a named successor; kept for history"
access: "public"
access_meaning: "anyone with the link"
topics:
  - "history"
  - "theory"
roles:
  - "security-architect"
  - "communications"
  - "researcher"
source_url: "https://github.com/SmithSamuelM/Papers/blob/master/presentations/Archive/KERI_Overview.pdf"
source_license: null
source_license_note: null
found_on: "smith-papers"
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: "2026-10-15"
kskb_url: "https://kskb.dev/cards/papers-keri-overview-2019/"
kskb_app_url: "https://kskb.dev/#item/papers-keri-overview-2019"
kskb_record_url: "https://kskb.dev/data/kskb/resources/papers-keri-overview-2019"
kskb_markdown_url: "https://kskb.dev/export/cards/papers-keri-overview-2019.md"
---

# Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI): Model for a Universal DKMI

A 39-slide early overview of Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI) by Samuel M. Smith, presenting KERI as a model for a universal Decentralized Key Management Infrastructure (DKMI). It covers self-certifying identifiers, autonomic identifiers and namespaces, pre-rotation, direct and witnessed modes, delegation, the state verifier engine and early KERI nomenclature.

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/presentations/Archive/KERI_Overview.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/).