🤖 AI Summary
Existing distributed systems lack a unified identifier scheme that simultaneously achieves storage efficiency, temporal orderability, embedded provenance metadata, query-free verifiability, external confidentiality, and cross-century addressability. This work proposes SKID, a three-layer identity architecture that, for the first time, integrates all six critical properties within a single framework. SKID employs a 64-bit time-topology integer primary key, a 128-bit BLAKE3-authenticated UUID extension, and an AES-256 single-block encryption layer to enable deterministic bidirectional conversion. The design ensures B-tree-friendly ordering and compact 8-byte storage while supporting zero-query verification and internal parseability without external readability, making it suitable for multi-century, cross-trust-boundary distributed systems.
📝 Abstract
Distributed applications need identifiers that satisfy storage efficiency, chronological sortability, origin metadata embedding, zero-lookup verifiability, confidentiality for external consumers, and multi-century addressability. Based on our literature survey, no existing scheme provides all six of these identifier properties within a unified system.
This paper introduces Source Known Identifiers (SKIDs), a three-tier identity system that projects a single entity identity across trust boundaries, addressing all six properties. The first tier, Source Known ID (SKID), is a 64-bit signed integer embedding a timestamp with a 250-millisecond precision, application topology, and a per-entity-type sequence counter. It serves as the database primary key, providing compact storage (8 bytes) and natural B-tree ordering for optimized database indexing. The second tier, Source Known Entity ID (SKEID), extends the SKID into a 128-bit Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) compatible value by adding an entity type discriminator, an epoch selector, and a BLAKE3 keyed message authentication code (MAC). SKEIDs enable zero-lookup verification of identifier origin, integrity, and entity type within trusted environments, with a big-endian byte layout that preserves chronological ordering in lexicographic UUID string comparisons. The third tier, Secure SKEID, encrypts the entire SKEID using AES-256 symmetric encryption as a single-block pseudorandom permutation, producing ciphertext indistinguishable from random bytes while remaining compatible with standard UUID data-type parsers in string representation. Deterministic bidirectional transformations connect all three tiers.