Panel: The Emerging Trust Layer for the Internet: Using Minimum Viable Protocols to Achieve Maximum Interoperability

The Trust Over IP Foundation (ToIP), which just had its fourth birthday, has long held the conviction that technical trust alone is insufficient for enabling human trust in digital interactions. Thus, ToIP has been developing a dual stack that pairs technical architecture with governance architecture.

To maximize technical interoperability, ToIP believes there must be a minimum viable “trust spanning” protocol that enables ubiquitous secure, private data exchange. Then every digital trust ecosystem can choose which higher-layer “trust task” protocols—such as exchanging digital credentials between digital wallets, or verifying ecosystem participants using trust registries—they need to meet their specific authenticity, confidentiality, and privacy requirements.

With regards to the harder problem of human trust, in the real world this is built through relationships, agreements and other intangible elements within a context. By contrast, in the digital world trust has to be engineered. This means each ecosystem needs to be able to define their governance architecture, policies, credentials, and trust lists/registries that can be communicated both within and across ecosystems using interoperable protocols to maximize the potential for cross-ecosystem trust relationships.

This interactive panel, moderated by ToIP’s Executive Director, will convene a set of ToIP leaders to explain why they have been investing in this new approach to decentralized digital trust infrastructure, where it fits with eIDAS 2.0, how it builds upon (not replaces) X.509 PKI and OpenID, and what to expect over the coming year.