nested cooperative delegated identifiers

Definition

In KERI delegations are cooperative, this means that both the delegator and delegate must contribute to a delegation. The delegator creates a cryptographic commitment in either a rotation or interaction event via a seal in a delegated establishment event. The delegate creates a cryptographic commitment in its establishment event via a seal to the delegating event. Each commitment is signed respectively by the committer. This cooperative delegation together with special superseding recovery rules for events enables cooperative recovery.

Recursive application

This superseding rule may be recursively applied to multiple levels of delegation, thereby enabling recovery of any set of keys signing or pre-rotated in any lower levels by a superseding rotation delegation at the next higher level. This cascades the security of the key management infrastructure of higher levels to lower levels. This is a distinctive security feature of the cooperative delegation of identifiers in KERI.

More information

More in chapter Nested Delegation Recovery of the whitepaper