---
id: "papers-verifiable-trust-bases"
type: "talk"
type_label: "Talks and presentations"
title: "Verifiable Trust Bases: Renewing the Web of Trust"
maintainer: "Samuel M. Smith"
authors:
  - "Samuel M. Smith"
date: "2020-10-20"
year: 2020
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"
  - "infrastructure"
roles:
  - "security-architect"
  - "infrastructure-operator"
  - "communications"
  - "researcher"
source_url: "https://github.com/SmithSamuelM/Papers/blob/master/presentations/KERIVerifiableTrustBases.web.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-verifiable-trust-bases/"
kskb_app_url: "https://kskb.dev/#item/papers-verifiable-trust-bases"
kskb_record_url: "https://kskb.dev/data/kskb/resources/papers-verifiable-trust-bases"
kskb_markdown_url: "https://kskb.dev/export/cards/papers-verifiable-trust-bases.md"
---

# Verifiable Trust Bases: Renewing the Web of Trust

A 52-slide deck by Samuel M. Smith, version 2.53 dated 2020-10-20, on how Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI) provides a verifiable trust basis for identifiers. It compares administrative, algorithmic and autonomic trust bases, presents the trust spanning layer and unified identifier model, and walks through delegation, witness and watcher modes, and discovery, for practitioners and designers.

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/KERIVerifiableTrustBases.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/).