Trust in Digital Systems = Human Accountability + Cryptographic Assurance
Cross-Industry Coalition Advances Standards for Trust in Digital Systems
The Human Colossus Foundation is proud to be a founding member of the Trust over IP Foundation.
On May 5th, The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organisation enabling mass innovation through open source, announced that it will host the Trust over IP (ToIP) Foundation, an independent project to enable trustworthy exchange and authentication of data between any two parties on the Internet. The ToIP Foundation will provide a robust, common standard that gives people and businesses the confidence that data is coming from an assured source, allowing them to connect, interact and innovate at a speed and scale not possible today.
“Trust over IP Primer” ©ToIP Foundation
Businesses today are struggling to protect and manage digital assets and data, especially in an increasingly complex enterprise environment that includes the Internet of Things (IoT), Edge Computing, Artificial Intelligence and much more. This is compounding the already low consumer confidence in the use of personal data and is slowing innovation on opportunities like digital identity and the adoption of new services that can support humanity.
Without a global standard for trust in digital systems, these trends are bound to continue. The ToIP Foundation will use digital identity models that leverage interoperable digital wallets and credentials and the new W3C Verifiable Credentials (authenticable credentials) standard to address these challenges and enable consumers, businesses and governments to better manage risk, improve digital trust and protect all forms of identity online.
“The ToIP Foundation has the promise to provide the digital trust layer that was missing in the original design of the Internet and to trigger a new era of human possibility,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation. “The combination of open standards and protocols, pan-industry collaboration and our neutral governance structure will support this new category of digital identity and authenticable data exchange.”
The Linux Foundation’s open governance model enables the ToIP Foundation to advance a combination of technology and governance standards for digital trust in a neutral forum that supports pan-industry collaboration. An open governance model that can be integrated into the development of these standards is essential where the business, legal and social guidelines for technology adoption impacts accountability at the human layer and cryptographic assurance at the machine layer.
The ToIP Foundation will initially host four Working Groups. The Technical Stack Working Group and the Governance Stack Working Group will focus on building out and hardening the Technical and Governance halves of the ToIP stack, respectively. The Utility Foundry Working Group and the Ecosystem Foundry Working Group will serve as communities of practice for projects that wish to collaborate on the development of ToIP utility networks or entire ToIP digital trust ecosystems.
“The synergistic domains of authentic data entry and deterministic data capture are required for organisations to integrate into a new dynamic data economy. The Human Colossus Foundation mission to implement decentralised semantics is aligned with the Trust over IP Foundation. We are proud to contribute to the collaborative projects and initiatives being launched,”
Paul Knowles, Head of the Advisory Council at The Human Colossus Foundation.
Founding Steering members include Accenture, BrightHive, Cloudocracy, Continuum Loop, CULedger, Dhiway, esatus, Evernym, Finicity, Futurewei Technologies, IBM Security, IdRamp, Lumedic, Mastercard, MITRE, the Province of British Columbia and SICPA.
Contributing members include AyanWorks, Collab Ventures, DIDx, GLEIF, The Human Colossus Foundation, iRespond, kiva.org, Marist College, Northern Block, R3, Scott S. Perry CPA, Secours.io, Streetcred ID, TNO and University of Arkansas.
For more information about the ToIP Foundation, visit www.trustoverip.org.
