Proposal - KERI (Key Event Receipt Infrastructure) Task Force

Owned by Kevin Griffin
Last updated: Jul 18, 2023
2 min read

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.

In return the community gets the benefit of a recognized standards organization and path forward to further standardization.

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:

AcronymFull Name of DeliverableDeliverable TypeLink to
Draft Deliverable		Lead AuthorsStatus/Notes
SAIDSelf-Addressing IdentifiersSpecificationIETF Spec Repo
Sam Smith
Active Draft
CESRComposable Event Streaming RepresentationSpecificationIETF Spec Repo
Sam Smith
Active Draft
CESR ProofCESR Proof SignaturesSpecificationIETF Spec Repo

Philip Feairheller

Active Draft
PTELPublic Transaction Event LogSpecificationIETF Spec Repo

Philip Feairheller


IPEXIssuance and Presentation Exchange protocolSpecificationIETF Spec Repo

Sam Smith

Philip Feairheller


OOBIOut-Of-Band-Introduction protocolSpecificationIETF Spec Repo

Sam Smith

Active Draft
DID KERIKERI DID MethodSpecificationIETF Spec Repo
Philip Feairheller

KERIKey Event Receipt InfrastructureSpecificationIETF Spec Repo
Sam Smith


Chairs

Please add your name to this list if you wish to be a chair:

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:

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