Overview

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On 5 May 2020, the Linux Foundation announced a new addition to its roster of global open source ecosystem projects: the Trust over IP Foundation.

The mission of this new Foundation is to simplify and standardize how trust is established online so that everyone can feel safe, secure, and private in all of our digital interactions—whether between individuals, businesses, governments, or any “thing” on the Internet of Things.

In this white paper, we will cover:

  • Digital Trust Challenge
  • Trust in the Pre-Internet Era: the simple, global mechanisms we evolved to establish trust in relationships before we ever went online.
  • The Internet Era and the “Trust Gap”: What happened when we moved online and why we ended out with such a large “trust gap” vs. real-world trust.
  • The New Era of Digital Trust: How we can finally bridge this trust gap with open standard digital credentials and governance frameworks.
  • The Trust over IP Stack: How this four-layer, dual-stack architecture has the potential to do for the peer-to-peer exchange of trustworthy digital credentials what the TCP/IP stack did for the peer-to-peer exchange of data packets.
  • The Role of the Trust over IP Foundation: How this new organization will provide a global forum for collaboration on developing, hardening, testing, and promoting the Trust over IP stack.
  • Trust over IP (ToIP) Stack: The starting definition of the ToIP stack was published as Hyperledger Aries RFC 0289.
  • Foundation Role and Process