pre rotation

Definition

Cryptographic commitment to next rotated key set in previous rotation or inception event.

Rotation

The main purpose of key rotation it to either prevent or recover from a successful compromise of one or more private keys by an exploiter. Given a potentially compromised private key, an exploiter could sign statements and even capture full control over the identifier by rotating the current key pair.

Pre-rotation

Pre-rotation mitigates successful exploit of a given set of signing private keys. There are several assumptions listed in chapter Pre-rotation of the KERI white paper about the circumstances under which pre-rotation is able to sustain this mitigation, e.g. it assumes that the private keys remains private until after issuance of the associated identifier.

Origin and technique

Pre-rotation is a new invention in KERI. Pre-rotation is a cryptographic commitment (a hash) to the next private/public key in the rotation-scheme.
Source: chapter Pre-rotation in whitepaper