Addressing and discovery

Audience: developers · Read route: rebuild · Reflects specification v0.1

Parties are addressed, and records are discovered, through the open overlay standards. The overlay is a routing fabric: it admits records into named topics, answers lookup queries, and exposes a live tail. It does this for many independent operators at once, each of which runs its own runtime and shares only the public audit layer beneath.

The open standards it rests on

Each of these is an open, published standard, cited neutrally and linked as a standard an implementer may follow directly. The reference does not restate them.

• The open overlay submit-and-lookup standard for the submit-and-lookup model.
• The open overlay naming-and-discovery standards for topic naming and discovery.
• The open mutual-authentication standards for mutual authentication between parties.

The overlay need not be trusted for integrity

The overlay does not hold state for the parties, and it does not need to be trusted for the integrity of a record, because integrity comes from the record's own signatures and its anchor, covered on Anchoring and the audit log. An overlay instance may be self-hosted, third-party operated, or both, and switching operators changes nothing another party can verify. This is the point that keeps addressing free of lock-in: the fabric that routes a record cannot alter or vouch for it.

Two meanings of "overlay"

The word "overlay" does two jobs in this reference, and conflating them causes confusion.

1. The routing fabric, described on this page: it moves records between parties towards the audit layer.
2. The off-line storage channel for field placement, described on The envelope and field-level encryption: when a field's placement is "overlay", its encrypted bytes sit in a storage channel and the record carries a reference plus the hash.

A record can be routed through the overlay fabric while its large fields are placed in an overlay storage channel, and these are separate roles even when the same infrastructure happens to serve both.

Provisional item PROV-3 (consortium membership and instance ownership), pending technical review. How addressing and discovery work over the open standards is normative and described above. Membership of any specific consortium overlay network, and the ownership of a given overlay instance, are operator-tier configuration and out of scope for this reference: the base protocol fixes the mechanism, not who operates a particular network or on what terms. This boundary is subject to technical review; see the specification, Section 9, PROV-3. The placement-storage half of PROV-3 is treated on The envelope and field-level encryption.

The rules behind this page

The MUST rules for overlay-based addressing and admission, topic naming and discovery, mutual authentication, and the requirement that no party need trust a specific overlay operator for integrity are in the specification, Section 3.2. This page explains the mechanism behind them.