The SSI Orbit Podcast – Self-Sovereign Identity, Decentralization and Digital Trust

#60 - Trust Spanning Protocol: Seven Key Pillars (with Drummond Reed)

Oct 6, 2023

01:17:37

Drummond Reed has spent a quarter-century in Internet identity, security, privacy, and trust infrastructure. He is Director, Trust Services at Gen Digital, previous Avast after their acquisition of Evernym, where he was Chief Trust Office. He is co-author of the book, Self-Sovereign Identity (Manning Publications, 2021), and co-editor of the W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DID) 1.0 specification. At the Trust over IP Foundation, Drummond is a member of the Steering Committee and co-chair of the Governance Stack Working Group and the Concepts and Terminology Working Group.

About Podcast Episode

Read more about the episode by heading to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://northernblock.io/podcasts/trust-spanning-protocol-seven-key-pillars⁠⁠⁠⁠

The full list of topics discussed between Drummond and Mathieu in this podcast episode include:

Internet's Broken State: Is the internet considered broken due to issues with security, privacy, authenticity, and confidentiality (SPAC)? How does this relate to the work in the digital trust space, especially with Trust over IP?
Trust over IP's Role: How does the Trust over IP technology architecture address the internet's shortcomings? Is the SPAC acronym a good framework for understanding the Trust over IP's approach?
Design Principles of Trust Finding Protocol: During the design phase of the trust spanning protocol, were there any trade-offs or concessions made, especially in terms of security, privacy, authenticity, or confidentiality?
Pillar 1: Verifiable Identifiers: Explaining the importance of verifiable identifiers as the first key pillar in the design of the trust spanning protocol.
Interoperability and Identifiers: Will endpoints need to support the same types of identifiers for interoperability? How does one endpoint evaluate another's capability to support a particular identifier?
Pillar 2: End-to-End Authenticity & Confidentiality: How does the trust spanning protocol ensure both authenticity and confidentiality in communications?
Pillar 3: Direct Connections: How does the trust spanning protocol handle direct connections between endpoints using different types of channels?
Pillar 4: Routing via Intermediaries: How does the protocol handle routing through intermediaries to ensure privacy and security? What might a practical implementation of this look like in the future?
Pillar 5: Relationship Context Channels: How does the trust spanning protocol handle changes in the context of interactions between endpoints?
Pillar 6: Text and Binary Encoding: How does the trust spanning protocol standardize the way endpoints communicate using text and binary encoding?
Pillar 7: Trust Task Protocol Framework: What is the trust task protocol framework, and how does it relate to specific protocols for different types of trust tasks?
Conclusion and Future: What's next for the trust spanning protocol? Are there any regulatory movements, like the Digital Markets Act, that might influence its development and adoption?