This architecture emerged from the client-server model where centralized authorities (certificate authorities, identity providers, social media platforms) mediate trust relationships. While functional for many use cases, this approach creates several fundamental problems:

Reconstruction Overhead: Every verification event requires rebuilding the entire trust chain from scratch, creating computational inefficiency and scalability limitations.

Temporal Fragility: Historical data cannot be verified once signatures expire or keys rotate, making long-term data integrity impossible to establish.

Centralization Dependencies: Verification requires access to and trust in centralized infrastructure, creating single points of failure and control.

Correlation Vulnerabilities: Centralized identity systems enable tracking and profiling across contexts, undermining privacy.

The authentic web concept emerged from recognizing that these limitations are not implementation details but fundamental architectural constraints of the "signed in motion" paradigm.

KERI's Approach

KERI (Key Event Receipt Infrastructure) provides the foundational solution to enable the authentic web vision by solving what Document 1 identifies as the "hard problem" of key state at rest.

Signed at Rest Architecture

KERI implements "signed at rest" as a core principle, meaning:

• All signatures are permanently retained with the data they authenticate
• Future validation remains possible indefinitely because cryptographic proofs persist
• No reconstruction of verification chains is required—the proof is self-contained

This contrasts fundamentally with traditional approaches. As Document 7 explains: "With signed in motion, you use ephemeral identifiers. You have to do everything anew every time you want to reconstruct a verifiable data structure."

Key State Management

The critical innovation KERI provides is maintaining verifiable key state over time through Key Event Logs (KELs). Each AID (Autonomic Identifier) maintains an append-only log of key events that:

• Records all key rotations with cryptographic commitments to next keys (pre-rotation)
• Enables verification of which keys were authoritative at any point in history
• Provides duplicity detection through witness consensus
• Supports independent verification without requiring access to the controller

This solves the fundamental problem that prevented persistent verifiable data structures: without knowing which keys were authoritative when a signature was created, historical signatures cannot be verified.

Scalability Properties

Document 1 outlines four specific scalability characteristics that KERI enables for the authentic web:

Append Anywhere: New data can be added to any part of the graph structure without requiring global ordering or consensus. Each KEL operates independently while maintaining verifiable connections to other KELs through seals and ACDCs (Authentic Chained Data Containers).

Fragment Verification: Validators can "hop into the graph to verify any fragment" without processing the entirety. This is possible because each ACDC and KEL is self-contained with all necessary cryptographic proofs.

Hash-Based Signing: Rather than signing complete data payloads, KERI signs cryptographic digests (SAIDs - Self-Addressing Identifiers). This reduces computational overhead while maintaining security through cryptographic commitment.

Independent Roots of Trust: Each tree integrated into the graph-forest maintains its own root-of-trust rather than requiring a single universal authority. This enables decentralized trust while maintaining verifiability.

ACDC Integration

The authentic web vision extends beyond identifier management to encompass all data through ACDCs. These containers provide:

• Proof-of-authorship: Cryptographically verifiable attribution to the original creator
• Proof-of-authority: Verifiable delegation chains for authorizations and credentials
• Chained provenance: Each ACDC can reference other ACDCs, forming a DAG of verifiable data
• Selective disclosure: Privacy-preserving mechanisms through graduated disclosure

As Document 12 explains, ACDCs enable "an 'authentic' web where all data on the web has verifiable proof-of-authorship."

Practical Implications

Mental Model Transformation

Document 5 emphasizes that the authentic web requires a fundamental shift in mental models: "The web will be one big graph. That's the mental model of the 'authentic web'." This transformation has several practical implications:

From Documents to Graph Fragments: Rather than thinking of web resources as isolated documents, the authentic web treats each piece of data as a node in a global verifiable graph with cryptographic edges.

From Trust-Based to Verification-Based: Instead of trusting intermediaries (certificate authorities, platforms, identity providers), participants independently verify cryptographic proofs.

From Ephemeral to Persistent: Signatures and proofs persist indefinitely, enabling historical verification and long-term data integrity.

Use Cases and Applications

Authentic Data Supply Chains: Document 16 describes how "any physical supply chain may be measured, monitored, regulated, audited, and/or archived by a data supply chain acting as a digital twin." The authentic web enables verifiable tracking of data provenance through supply chains.

Credential Ecosystems: The vLEI (verifiable Legal Entity Identifier) ecosystem demonstrates practical implementation, providing cryptographically verifiable credentials for legal entities with delegated authorization chains.

Content Attribution: In an era of AI-generated content and deepfakes, the authentic web provides mechanisms to verify the origin and authenticity of digital content without relying on platform attestations.

Decentralized Knowledge Graphs: Document 17 describes how ACDCs enable "securely attributed fragments of a distributed property graph" that can form verifiable knowledge graphs with privacy protection.

Trade-offs and Considerations

The Security Properties Trilemma: Document 2 introduces a fundamental constraint: systems can achieve high levels of any two of authenticity, confidentiality, and privacy, but not all three simultaneously. The authentic web prioritizes authenticity first, confidentiality second, and maximizes privacy within those constraints.

Complexity vs. Capability: The authentic web architecture introduces complexity in exchange for verifiability. Developers must understand concepts like key event logs, witness pools, and cryptographic commitments that are absent from traditional web architectures.

Infrastructure Requirements: Realizing the authentic web vision requires new infrastructure components including witnesses, watchers, registrars, and OOBI (Out-Of-Band Introduction) resolution services.

Adoption Challenges: The authentic web represents a paradigm shift that requires coordinated adoption across multiple layers of internet infrastructure, from protocols to applications to user interfaces.

Current State and Future Direction

As of the source documents' timestamps (2022-2023), the authentic web remains primarily a vision with foundational components under active development. Document 10 shows active work on implementations including KERIpy, KERIox, and various tooling. The GLEIF vLEI ecosystem represents the first large-scale production deployment of authentic web principles.

Document 5 articulates the urgency: "The inability to verify 'who said what' on the internet has reached critical levels" due to AI-generated deception, surveillance concerns, and democratic threats. The authentic web offers a pathway to restore verifiable attribution and trust in digital communications through cryptographic means rather than institutional authority.

The vision is ambitious: transforming the entire internet into a verifiable data structure. KERI provides the cryptographic foundation and architectural principles to make this vision technically feasible, though realizing it fully requires sustained development, standardization, and adoption across the internet ecosystem.