pre rotation - WebOfTrust/WOT-terms GitHub Wiki

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