The investigation of the deep connection between Lfunctions and arithmetic is at the heart of modern number theory. By now we have a number of partial results on this matter, many of which due to celebrated results obtained via the Euler system method that has been developed by Thaine, Kolyvagin, Rubin and Mazur.However, all of these (unconditional) results are restricted to cases where the order of vanishing of the L-function is at most one. Although a notion of higher-rank Euler system was already established by Perrin-Riou more than 20 years ago, technical issues arising from the use of exterior powers hindered the theory surrounding higher-rank Euler systems from being fully operational. These technical obstructions have only recently been overcome by Burns, Sakamoto and Sano in a series of articles ([BS21], [BSS19a],[BSS19b] and [BSS19c]). Key to their approach is the consistent use of exterior biduals instead of exterior powers, a notion that is based on the lattice introduced by Rubin [Rub96, §1.2] and provides better functorial properties in many aspects.Since Euler systems are, by their very definition, universal norms on Z pextensions, we feel that the study of higher-rank universal norms undertaken in this article naturally fits into the chain of developments described above. As in the aforementioned works, the use of exterior biduals allows us to develop a theory that naturally extends the classical theory of universal norms to both the higher-rank and equivariant settings.Overview of results. To explain our results in a little more detail, we first introduce some notation. Let L|K be a finite abelian extension of