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authentic web

Definition​

The authentic web is the internet as a whole giant verifiable data structure. Also called Web5. The web will be one big graph. That's the mental model of the 'authentic web'.

  • Signed at rest - the data never throws away any signature of data. Because otherwise we can't validate data in the future
  • Key state at rest - you need to solve this hard problem too. This is the hard problem KERI solves.
  • Signed in motion - signatures get thrown away. You use ephemeral identifiers. You have to do everything anew every time you want to reconstruct a verifiable data structure. Therefore we need 'Signed at rest'.

Scalability of Key state at rest​

  • You can append to any part of the (directed-acyclic) graph
  • You can hop into the graph to verify any fragment of the graph
  • You don't have to sign the data,you just have to sign hashes of this data
  • Every tree that gets integrated in this giant graph-forest has its own Root of Trust

KERI solves all hard problems of the authentic web in a scalable manner.

Technically oriented deep dive​

See more in Concepts behind KERI