Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI)
draft-ssmith-keri-00

Abstract

An identity system-based secure overlay for the Internet is presented. This is based on a Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI) or the KERI protocol [KERI][KERI-ID][RFC0791]. This includes a primary root-of-trust in self-certifying identifiers (SCIDs) [UIT][SCPK][SFS][SCPN][SCURL]. It presents a formalism for Autonomic Identifiers (AIDs) and Autonomic Namespaces (ANs). They are part of an Autonomic Identity System (AIS). This system uses the design principle of minimally sufficient means to provide a candidate trust spanning layer for the internet. Associated with this system is a decentralized key management infrastructure (DKMI). The primary root-of-trust are self-certifying identifiers that are strongly bound at issuance to a cryptographic signing (public, private) keypair. These are self-contained until/unless control needs to be transferred to a new keypair. In that event, an append-only chained key-event log of signed transfer statements provides end verifiable control provenance. This makes intervening operational infrastructure replaceable because the event logs may be served up by any infrastructure including ambient infrastructure. End verifiable logs on ambient infrastructure enable ambient verifiability (verifiable by anyone, anywhere, at any time). The primary key management operation is key rotation (transference) via a novel key pre-rotation scheme [DAD][KERI]. Two primary trust modalities motivated the design, these are a direct (one-to-one) mode and an indirect (one-to-any) mode. The indirect mode depends on witnessed key event receipt logs (KERL) as a secondary root-of-trust for validating events. This gives rise to the acronym KERI for key event receipt infrastructure. In the direct mode, the identity controller establishes control via verified signatures of the controlling keypair. The indirect mode extends that trust basis with witnessed key event receipt logs (KERL) for validating events. The security and accountability guarantees of indirect mode are provided by KA2CE or KERI’s Agreement Algorithm for Control Establishment among a set of witnesses. The KA2CE approach may be much more performant and scalable than more complex approaches that depend on a total ordering distributed consensus ledger. Nevertheless, KERI may employ a distributed consensus ledger when other considerations make it the best choice. The KERI approach to DKMI allows for more granular composition. Moreover, because KERI is event streamed it enables DKMI that operates in-stride with data events streaming applications such as web 3.0, IoT, and others where performance and scalability are more important. The core KERI engine is identifier namespace independent. This makes KERI a candidate for a universal portable DKMI [KERI][KERI-ID][UIT].

Authors

Samuel M. Smith

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