Samuel M. Smith
- Invented KERI, Key Event Receipt Infrastructure, a ledger-less approach to decentralized identifiers
- Authored the IETF Authentic Chained Data Containers (ACDC) draft
- PhD in electrical and computer engineering, Brigham Young University
Bio
Samuel M. Smith invented KERI, Key Event Receipt Infrastructure, and authored the IETF draft for Authentic Chained Data Containers. KERI is an open-source project at the Decentralized Identity Foundation and underpins the vLEI credential scheme used for legal-entity identity.
Profile built from public academic, IETF, and project records.
Where their work shows up
Most decentralized identifier methods anchor to a ledger, which means the identifier's security depends on that ledger continuing to exist and behave. KERI's argument is that it does not need one: a key event log, witnessed and duplicity-detectable, is sufficient to prove control of an identifier over time, including through key rotation. Whether that holds is one of the live technical arguments in the field. See what is self-sovereign identity and verifiable credentials.
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