01 — Overview

MIR Protocol (Memory Infrastructure Registry) is an open specification for recording and verifying participation claims across distributed systems.

A MIR claim is a cryptographically signed record that asserts: a specific event involving a pseudonymous subject occurred at a specific time, as attested by a specific domain.

MIR Protocol defines the portable, domain-signed claim format. Policy decisions, trust tiers, and scoring are an optional application layer built on top.

Core Properties

• Cryptographically verifiable. Every claim carries an Ed25519 signature from the issuing domain. Verification requires no trusted third party.
• Registry-agnostic. Claims can be verified offline, peer-to-peer, or against any registry. No single registry is authoritative.
• Non-scoring. MIR records participation. It does not calculate trust, reputation, or behavioral rankings.
• Non-evaluative. MIR does not judge whether a claim is true. It proves who made the claim, when, and that it has not been altered.
• Privacy-minimizing by design. Subject identifiers are domain-scoped hashes. No plaintext PII enters the protocol.

What a Claim Proves

Given a valid MIR claim, any verifier can independently confirm:

1. Authorship. The claim was signed by a key controlled by the stated domain.
2. Integrity. The claim has not been modified since signing.
3. Time. The claim asserts a specific timestamp (and registries may provide an independent ingestion timestamp).

What a Claim Does Not Prove

• Truthfulness. A domain can sign a false claim. MIR proves authorship, not accuracy.
• Identity. The subject hash is pseudonymous. MIR does not identify real-world individuals.
• Current status. A mir.transaction.completed claim does not mean the transaction was not later refunded.

Architecture

┌────────────┐          ┌────────────┐          ┌──────────┐
│   Domain   │  sign    │   Claim    │  verify  │ Verifier │
│ (key pair) │─────────▶│ (portable) │◀─────────│ (anyone) │
└────────────┘          └────────────┘          └──────────┘
                              │
                              │ optional
                              ▼
                        ┌──────────┐
                        │ Registry │
                        │(discover,│
                        │timestamp,│
                        │  index)  │
                        └──────────┘

• Domains generate Ed25519 key pairs and publish public keys via DNS or .well-known.
• Claims are self-contained, signed JSON documents. They are portable and verifiable anywhere.
• Verifiers discover the domain's public key and verify the signature. No registry required.
• Registries are optional infrastructure: discovery, timestamp anchoring, availability indexing. They are not trust anchors.

Protocol Documents