Re: Introduction and update on Universal DID-Native Addressing (UDNA)

Hi Manu,

Thank you for the warm welcome and for taking the time to look at the
work—much appreciated!

At a high level, the minimal viable implementation of UDNA would focus
on *addressing
and routing based on cryptographic identities (DIDs) rather than network
locations*. This doesn’t require building a full alternative to TCP/IP or
UDP, but rather an overlay layer on top of existing transport protocols in
a *transport-agnostic* way.

For example, we could use UDP with a custom reliability layer as the
transport, but the packets would *replace IP addresses with DIDs*. Route
discovery could leverage a Kademlia DHT. When sending a packet, the sender
would include only a DID, which is permanent, while the underlying IP
endpoints can change to reflect the latest reachable location. DID
resolution would be handled in the *UDNA packet header*, which has its own
wire format containing fields relevant to DIDs rather than IPs—this could
include DID type, DID length, DID bytes, RouteHint, KeyHint, Nonce, and
Signature.

On Sat, 20 Sept 2025 at 06:15, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 20, 2025 at 6:57 AM Amir Hameed <amsaalegal@gmail.com> wrote:
> > UDNA is an initiative currently incubated under the W3C CG repo
> (w3c-cg/udna) with the mission of establishing a framework for treating
> Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) as first-class network primitives. Instead
> of addressing nodes by location (e.g. IP), UDNA proposes a model where
> endpoints are addressed by cryptographic identity.
>
> Hi Amir, welcome to the group! The work that you are doing is
> fascinating and I took a look at your website and goals.
>
> What do you think is the minimal viable implementation of the work you
> are discussing? Is it a new type of router? Is it an alternative
> network protocol to TCP/IP or UDP? What would be the minimum thing
> that could be built that uses UDNA?
>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> https://www.digitalbazaar.com/
>