1. Threat Model

In a decentralized registry environment, malicious actors could attempt to publish counterfeit manifests claiming authority over third-party domains. RFC 0003 introduces two layers of defense:

1. DNS TXT Authority Challenge: Domain owners publish a TXT token at _msr-challenge.<domain>.
2. Canonical Payload Signing: The manifest is signed using Ed25519 (or ECDSA P-256).

2. Canonical JSON Serialization (RFC 8785)

Before calculating the cryptographic signature, the manifest JSON object MUST be normalized using the Canonical JSON (JCS) algorithm described in RFC 8785 with the trust.signatures property temporarily removed.

3. Ed25519 Wire Representation

The computed 64-byte signature is encoded as lowercase hexadecimal and placed in trust.signatures.manifest_signature. The public key is Base64-encoded SubjectPublicKeyInfo (SPKI) DER.