Rationale
KERI has been developed in the open source community since the original white paper (here) authored by Dr Samuel Smith was published. KERI has seen adoption in multiple sectors most notably the GLEIF vLEI ecosystem and subsequent launch in to production January of 2023.
It has fostered and developed seven supplemental specifications over time and has a reference implementation KERIpy and implementations of CESR in both TypeScript and Rust.
KERI has an active open source community participating in, promoting and representing KERI at events like IIW and the European Identity Conference.
As the community looks towards further standardization ToIP is an ideal venue to conduct further horizontal review and continue to inform the TSWG Trust spanning layer work.
The community feels adoption of the KERI and supplemental specifications would bolster both ToIP and the groups already invested heavily in KERI.
Purpose
The purpose of the Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI) Task Force is to help draft and incubate a family of specifications that defines the KERI ecosystem.
KERI is the first truly decentralized identity system. It is ledger-less which means it doesn’t need to use a ledger at all or ledger-portable which means that its identifiers are not locked to any given ledger and may switch as needed. In other words KERI identifiers are truly portable.
Deliverables
The table below lists all deliverables of the KERI Task Force:
| Acronym | Full Name of Deliverable | Deliverable Type | Link to Draft Deliverable | Lead Authors | Status/Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SAID | Self-Addressing Identifiers | Specification | IETF Spec Repo | Active Draft | |
| CESR | Composable Event Streaming Representation | Specification | IETF Spec Repo | Active Draft | |
| CESR Proof | CESR Proof Signatures | Specification | IETF Spec Repo | Active Draft | |
| PTEL | Public Transaction Event Log | Specification | IETF Spec Repo | ||
| IPEX | Issuance and Presentation Exchange protocol | Specification | IETF Spec Repo | ||
| OOBI | Out-Of-Band-Introduction protocol | Specification | IETF Spec Repo | Active Draft | |
| DID KERI | KERI DID Method | Specification | IETF Spec Repo | ||
| KERI | Key Event Receipt Infrastructure | Specification | IETF Spec Repo |
Chairs
Please add your name to this list if you wish to be a chair:
- Samuel Smith, ProSapien Sam Smith
- Philip Feairheller, GLEIF Philip Feairheller
- Kevin Griffin, GLEIF Kevin Griffin
Members
Please add your name to this list in any desired role:
- Primary Editors
Secondary Editors
- Primary Reviewers
Secondary Reviewers
- Observers
Meeting Schedule
The KERI TF currently holds a meeting every two weeks on Tuesdays:
- NA/EU: 10:00-11:00 EST / 14:00-15:00 UTC
For all authoritative meeting logistics and Zoom links, please see the ToIP Calendar.
See latest documentation in the GitHub Repo here: LINK
Meeting Agendas and Notes
All meeting agendas and notes are recorded on the KERI Meeting Page.
Intellectual Property Rights (Copyright, Patent, Source Code)
As a Task Force (TF) of the Technology Stack WG (TSWG), the KERI TF inherits the IPR terms from the TSWG JDF Charter. These include:
- Copyright mode: Apache2 and IETF Copyright
- Patent mode: Apache2
- Source code: Apache 2.0, available at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html.
- The KERI TF is not expected to produce source code.
Mailing List and Communications
This task force uses the following for communications
- Slack: This TF has its own dedicated Slack channel: #tswg-keri-tf
- Github: This TF will use GitHub issues for substantive conversations on topics, not Slack. This way the conversation is source controlled.
Specification Generation
Currently specializations use the IETF draft template but we acknowledge that will need to migrate over time, likely to ISO format.
We may alternatively use the following formats:
- Markdown: Draft portions spec written in Markdown
- SpecUP: Final version of spec processed with SpecUp